


Upon a dream

by Wherethereissmoak



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Arrow (TV 2012) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dream Sharing, F/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, olicity - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-01 02:46:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 25,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8604157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wherethereissmoak/pseuds/Wherethereissmoak
Summary: Oliver and Felicity have been sharing dreams their entire life, but by the time they realize the other is a real person, they also realize only one of them can remember them during the daytime. AKA "How Oliver Queen had to get Felicity Smoak to fall in love with him twice."





	1. Help me help you

**Author's Note:**

> This story made up half my Nanowrimo project. I'm so excited to share it with you. It is completed, so you can expect an update every week. This is an AU, but it also runs parallel to some canon through season 3. No beta, so all the errors are mine! I hope you enjoy!

Oliver took a deep breath before he stepped into her cubicle. This was it. The moment they had been waiting for. So why was he so nervous?

He knocked on the side of her cubicle and said “Felicity Smoak?” She turned and his heart skipped a beat. He had known her in a way for most of his life, but now, seeing her right before him in person, so vibrant and tangible…it took his breath away.

She wore a bright pink shirt and her glasses had slipped down her nose as she chewed a red pen. She looked at him expectantly, and finally he began to recover. He introduced himself and she did a cute ramble about not calling him Mr. Queen.

He brought her the laptop that was riddled with bullet holes from the Deadshot case. He could tell by the tilt of Felicity’s head that she did not believe the ridiculous lies he was offering about spilling a latte on it at a coffee shop.

Still, she agreed to look at it and he got the information he needed. As he was saying his goodbyes, he stalled, taking in a last look at her before he left. When he did, his heart shattered. He had expected this, but nothing could have prepared him for the reality.

He was looking into the eyes of the woman he loved – and she had absolutely no idea who he was.

Oliver quickly left Queen Consolidated and went to the Foundry, taking out some of his frustration on the training dummies. He punched it so many times that some blisters formed and started to bleed. Cursing to himself, he washed off the wounds and dressed them. He had worked his body to the point of exhaustion – his ultimate goal.

He sent a quick text to his mom that he was staying out for a night on the town, knowing she would assume he went home with a random girl like he did in the past. He pulled out a sleeping bag and pillow that he kept in the foundry for occasions such as these.

Though he was exhausted, he laid there in the dark for several minutes, trying to will himself to sleep. But as always, the harder you tried to sleep, the longer it took for it to happen. With thoughts of Felicity and her red pen, he finally drifted off.

_“What did you do there?” Felicity asked him as he walked over to her and pulled her into his arms. He closed his eyes and savored the feeling of her. She grabbed his hands and rubbed over the bandages she saw there. Oliver marveled at how real it all felt, even though they both knew it was just a dream._

_“I was…a little frustrated,” he said, pulling her even closer._

_She pulled away from him and he could see tears running down her face. “Oh Oliver, I’m so sorry!”_

_He brushed the tears away and pulled her back into his embrace. “Hey, hey, it’s not your fault. We knew this would happen. But I guess…I was hoping that when you saw me, everything would come back to you.”_

_“And it didn’t,” she sobbed, her voice muffled into Oliver’s chest._

_“I wish I could describe to you how it felt. You just looked at me like I was a stranger. It was the worst,” Oliver said._

_“I remember…somehow. When I first arrived here tonight, I had the memories of our past, and the new memories from today. It was like a punch in the gut,” Felicity said softly._

_“OK, so this sucks, but we need to move past it and maybe this works to our advantage.” Oliver said. His strategic thinking acquired through his five years away kicking in._

_“How could any of this possibly work to our advantage?” Felicity asked._

_“Well, you…Felicity can help me with the other Felicity. Since you seem aware of what’s happening when you’re awake, you can let me know how you…she…is thinking and we can plan from there,” Oliver said._

_“You want me to help myself fall in love with you?”_

_“Yeah, I guess,” Oliver replied._

_Suddenly they both started laughing at the ridiculousness of their situation. While the events of the day had been stressful, the truth was that they were both relieved to finally be at this point after years of waiting._

The dreams started when Oliver was a few years old, and Felicity was just a baby. Obviously, they did not have much communication at that point. All Oliver could remember from that time was that seeing the little baby in the crib in his dream world always made him feel better. He would sing to her all the songs he learned in preschool.

When she grew into a toddler and he was in elementary school, he finally learned her name…Felicity. He smiled every time she tried to pronounce his name. Most of the time it sounded like “Ow-wee-fer.”  He was probably the only kid his age that always went to bed without argument every night. In fact, his parents always were shocked at how eager he seemed to be tucked in. But Oliver knew that the moment he was asleep, he would dream of her.

By the time Felicity entered kindergarten, he realized how smart she was. She learned faster than he ever did and sometimes her knowledge rivaled his…and he was several grades ahead of her. They would tell each other each and every detail of their days. Felicity talked much more than he ever did, but he loved to lay in the grass of their dream world and just watch her ramble. He laughed at all the stories she told about the people who lived in Las Vegas.

He told her how he got into a fight in school and was suspended for a week after he broke another kid’s nose. He told her about how he had taken the city bus downtown to Queen Consolidated one day to visit his father, only to find him making out with one of his assistants.

Felicity always comforted him, but when he told these sad details about his life, she always got a worried crease between her eyebrows. As if she was figuring something out, but didn’t want to voice the thought.

He never realized why until she was nine years old and her father left her. She spent the entire night in their dream crying her eyes out. Seeing her so upset and practically feeling her grief, he came to a startling realization…Felicity was not a figment of his imagination. He would not conjure up this kind of pain for an imaginary friend that was his sounding board in his dreams. Felicity was a real girl, with a real life and real feelings.

The realization shook the young boy to his core. He started asking his parents questions about all things supernatural, and they stared at him like he had grown a third head. They even started talking about sending him to a psychologist.

He went to the library to look up books, but as one who had not really spent much time reading, he was hopelessly lost. Wanting answers…he finally brought the subject up with the smartest person he knew, Felicity herself.

He stated her theory about her being a real person, and she laughed and told him that she was indeed real. She said she had been just as surprised when she realized he was not an invention of her very creative brain.

Oliver asked her if she could do some research during the day to see what was happening to them. To find out if anything like this had happened before with anyone else. She frowned when he told her the story of trying to find stuff at the library.

It was then that they learned the truly strange thing about their nightly visits – while Oliver woke up each day with full memory of their dream meetings, Felicity did not. She woke up refreshed and happy each day, but with no dream recollection whatsoever. And when she fell asleep each night, she awoke in the dream world with all her memories returned.

This grated on Oliver a little, because she had become such an important part of his life. Whenever he was feeling down or stressed at school or in his mausoleum of a mansion, he would think of Felicity and it would be as if a burst of sunshine had filled his heart. To think that Felicity did not remember him each day made him sad. And judging by the look on her face, it devastated her as well.

As they journeyed through the trials and annoyances of the teenage world – the grew closer. Felicity would cry on his shoulder every night about how the girls at school would pick on her. Apparently, they mocked not only her lack of father, but her mother’s occupation as a cocktail waitress. Her nerdy personality and the fact that she was smarter by far than all of them did not help her situation either.

Oliver also sat and listened each night too when she went on and on about the various boys she was crushing on. This made him grind his teeth a little. Listening to her complain about how guys never noticed her made his resolve to not do so himself waver a little.

It was getting harder and harder each day to not notice how beautiful Felicity was. Even though she was going through a goth phase at the moment, he was strangely into it. She had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. They sparkled whenever she smiled.

He had talked once about trying to find her in the real world, but Felicity had shot him down with sad eyes. She would have no idea who he was, and with her current angsty attitude in real life, she would probably push him away with everything she had. 

“I would think you were Looney Tunes,” she said. “And if you tried to flirt with me, that would make me more skeptical because you’re well…you and I’m me.”

He had tried to argue with that line of thinking, but she would hear none of it. Through the years she had tried to give him library search tips to find information about what was happening to them and why, but he was never able to come up with anything.

They resigned themselves to live with an unusual friendship in their dreams.  As they continued to age, their connection deepened. While Felicity was shy and reserved in her regular life – Oliver was her outlet. She told him everything. The good, the bad, the random. He loved listening to her talk.

And while he played the rich playboy slacker in his daily life – he shared his true thoughts and feelings with her. About how the pressure to live up to his father’s expectations weighed heavily on him each day. How everyone just assumed he would not be dedicated to schoolwork, so he fulfilled their prophecy and did not apply himself. He told her about his dreams, about how he worried about the safety of his best friend Tommy.

They even gave each other nicknames, which they loved because it was something they shared with no one else. She called him “Rake” as a joke – because that’s what they called rich young troublemakers in the Jane Austen novels she read. He called her “Pixel,” after she ranted and raved about the latest computer monitor update one day.

Their dream world differed each night. Sometimes it was a coffee shop. Sometimes it was a grassy field. None of the places were unpleasant, but they preferred the outdoors settings. They would lay in the grass, stare at the sky, hold hands and talk for the whole night.

In their teenage years, they had kissed…once.  She had been babbling about the newest computer that she had assembled; talking about all the new parts she was able to include this time, and the ahead-of-its time video card. He was grinning from ear to ear, listening to her talk, and he couldn’t stop staring at her lips. On a whim, he leaned forward and captured them with his own.

It was a sweet kiss. Her mouth formed an “O” in surprise when their lips met. He deepened the kiss and they spent a few minutes just lost in it, in each other. When they both pulled back, the look of amazement and wonder was mirrored in each other’s eyes.

And that was it. Though it was painful on both their parts, they agreed that their relationship could not be romantic because they could not see each other in real life. They had to move on with live their lives, but would still enjoy each other as friends in their own little dream world.

It was hard, at times he just wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her again. She would gaze at him longingly when she thought he wasn’t looking.

To force themselves to move on, they started dating people in their “day” lives. Felicity, having graduated high school early and enrolled in MIT, soon found a boyfriend in Cooper Seldon. Their relationship was romantic, but they also sent most of their time on the computer hacking. As such, he did not seem to notice that Felicity was getting her emotional needs filled elsewhere.

Oliver’s girlfriend, Laurel Lance, however, did notice. She was always trying to push him to talk about his day, his life, his dreams, his goals, etc. But he was always only sharing part of himself. It frustrated her to no end, but still she stuck around. When she continued to push him for more, and to further their commitment, he balked. Frustrated with her pushing and with the fact that he couldn’t be with the person he really had feelings for – he sought physical comfort in the arms of women. Many of them.

Felicity didn’t chastise him when he shared of his exploits, even though he was secretly hoping that she would. She just looked at him with sad eyes that cut him to the core.

The worst part of their dream sharing was that really there was no escaping each other if they just needed a break. If Oliver was being too much of a man whore and she didn’t really want to look at him right then, or if Felicity was having issues with Cooper that he would rather not hear…they were stuck with each other.

It reached the point where sometimes they would just sit the nights in silence, staring at the sky of their dream world. But more times than not, they would be next to each other, holding hands again before the morning came.

After Oliver dropped out of his latest college, his father pressured him to take an entry level position at Queen Consolidated in hopes of inspiring some maturity to develop. He even invited Oliver on a sailing trip to conduct business in China. Laurel started hinting that they should move in together. Frustrated with his waking and sleeping hours…Oliver did something rash. He seduced his girlfriend’s little sister and convinced her to come on the boat trip with him.

When the Queen’s Gambit sank, everything changed for both Oliver and Felicity. Felicity had seen the news reports of the ship going down during the day. It had barely registered on her consciousness and she had quickly returned to her computer programming. But when she finally fell asleep that day and her memories of Oliver came back – she was sent into a panic. He was not in the dream world at all either, so she was sure he was dead.

She spent three nights curled into a ball, grieving him. Even during her daytime hours, she was depressed even though she didn’t know the reason why. Finally, on the fourth night as she lay sobbing in the grass, Oliver appeared next to her, looking worse for the wear.

“Rake!” She cried as she leaped into his arms. They held each other for what seemed like an eternity. He rubbed his hands in circles on her back while she sobbed.

“I’m OK, Pix, I’m OK,” he repeated softly over and over until she finally was soothed.

He told her about the boat sinking. About how he had lost Sara and had been in and out of consciousness for days. About waking up in the boat and his father shooting himself. He was on the island now, but had been scrambling for survival for the past few days so had not been to sleep during regular hours.

Felicity also guessed that he was probably somewhere with a much different time zone, so their sleep schedule was opposite.

Still, she became a lightpost for him while he was surviving on the island. Despite their opposite schedules, they always were able to spend a couple of hours together each day or night. Oliver had started taking mid-day naps just so he could connect with her.

He told her as much as he could about what was happening to him on the island. About the various people he met, and the training he received.  Since their time together was limited, she didn’t share as much about her life as she used to – although he did notice when she arrived in dream land with blonde hair and sad eyes after the death of Cooper.

When Oliver met Shado on the island everything changed.  She started to notice how Oliver was eager to go to sleep every night – even on top of how tired he was from training. And she noticed the random naps he was taking during the day. He always felt her eyes scrutinizing him.

Finally, after several weeks together, she finally spoke, and while he was marooned on an island he and Felicity finally got the answers they were looking for their whole life.

“You have a dream-mate, don’t you?” she asked Oliver softly one day, not wanting Slade who was chopping away through the jungle to form a path in front of them.

Oliver stopped in shock and stared at her.

“A dream-mate? What do you mean?” Oliver said.

“Someone who has shared your dreams your whole life. The reason you are in such a hurry to fall asleep each night,” Shado said.

“Do you know anything about it?” he asked in surprise.

She told him that it was a popular legend where she was from. That there were soulmates on the planet, some that lived miles apart, but shared dreams each night. Many centuries ago, it was much more common, but it had become more and more rare. People hardly talked about it anymore, and it was just chalked up to being a fable.

“It is a gift that you have been given,” Shado said in awe. “Someday you will be able to meet this girl and when your days and nights are both together, you will feel complete.”

Surprised that she knew so much about the greatest mystery of his life, he had a million questions – but one was the biggest in his mind.

“Why can I remember her when I wake up, but she can’t?” he asked sadly.

“Because the fates did want to make it so easy for you,” she said with a chuckle.

She explained the folk stories said that the memory spell applied to only one of the pair, and the only way to break it was for the other person to make them fall in love with them – without telling them about the dreams.

“So I can find her and talk to her?” Oliver said reverently, as he had never believed that was a possibility.

“Yes, but you cannot tell her about the dreams,” Shado said. “You have to make her fall in love with you first. But it shouldn’t be too difficult. You are soulmates, after all. ”

“Not like I can do anything about it while I’m here on this island,” Oliver said glumly.

She smiled at him.

“Fate will find a way. The fact that you have a dream mate is wonderful news because it means that you are destined to get off this island,” Shado said.

That night, was eager to fall asleep and talk to Felicity. They didn’t get back to their shelter until late, so he knew she was probably getting close to waking up for the day. On the way back to the shelter, his mind had been racing with the information Shado had given him.

Although it put a lot of burden on him to make Felicity fall in love with him, it meant that they were destined to be together, and he didn’t have to suppress his feeling for her anymore. Which was great, because he was already hopelessly in love with Felicity Smoak.


	2. Bless the Broken Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver shares the news with Felicity, and the two begin their journey toward each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello readers! I hope you all had a great week (well the best week you could possibly have with no new episode of Arrow). Thank you for the wonderful response to my first chapter! I love this story and I'm happy some of you do too! 
> 
> Enjoy Chapter 2! No beta so the mistakes are all mine.

Oliver arrived in the dream to find a nervous looking Felicity.

“Thank God you’re here! I thought I was going to miss you because I have to get up early today for my exams!”

He rushed over to her and pulled her into his arms for a big hug.

“Oof,” she said, muted into his chest. “What was that for?”

He pulled back and looked at her for a minute. Her new blonde hair suited her. Felicity’s eyes sparkled as always and even though she probably wasn’t wearing lipstick while sleeping, her lips were a bright pink color in the dream. Her eyes searched his face, wondering why he was being so silent.

He placed a hand on each of her cheeks, leaned forward and placed a soft kiss on her lips. Felicity froze in shock. 

“Oliver…what’s going on?” she asked as he pulled away.

“I have news, but if you have to go soon, I think it should wait,” he said.

She gave him her patented Felicity scowl face. “Um, no way mister, you know how I hate mysteries. And you can’t just go all kissing me after we agreed not to without talking about it.”

He mentally prepared himself for her LOUD VOICE, but he noticed her starting to fade away.

“Oh frak…I’m waking up…don’t think this is the last you have heard on this subject, mister,” she said as she faded away to nothing.

He grinned; the only thing dimming his mood was that he missed her already. He laid down on the grass and stared at the sky. Now that he knew all that Shado had told him, he had renewed purpose to get off the island. He had to get back and find his girl.

But then, a sad thought entered his mind and settled there like a seed taking root. What if he couldn’t get Felicity to fall in love with him? He loved her, but how did she feel about him? She had kept him at arm’s length romantically for years. Did she not think of him in that way?

No, she had kissed him back when they kissed the first time and just now. There were definitely feelings there. But what about the Felicity during the daytime? She would have no idea who he was. And let’s face it, he was a mess.

His time on the island had not been great, and who knows when he would get out of here. And what toll getting home would take on his body? Plus there was the promise he had made to his father to right all of his wrongs. Did he really want to bring Felicity into that life? It was too dangerous.

But really, could he do it without her? He had been planning on using some of her brainpower during sleeping hours, would the daytime be any different?

No, it wouldn’t be. Felicity was Felicity, no matter if she was awake or asleep. But getting her to fall for him would be a challenge. They came from two different worlds. She grew up in Vegas, the daughter of a single mom. He had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth. She was serious in school, he was a party boy. On paper, they could not be more different. But the two of them together was something magical. He just had to find a way to tap into that without her knowledge of their lifetime of dream sharing together.

He could not flirt his way into Felicity Smoak’s heart like he did with all the other girls he had one night stands with in the past. His charm wouldn’t get his foot even in the door. No, his Felicity would require something else to woo her. He just had no idea what, but he was determined to figure it out.

The next day, he traveled with Shado and Slade to spy on the others on the island. They had to come up with a plan to defeat them and maybe rescue Sara, Oliver hoped. When they stopped to rest for the night, he finally had a chance to tell Felicity what Shado had shared.

For once in her life, she was quiet. Oliver got more and more nervous as she sat there and absorbed his news, not speaking.

Finally, he could not take the silence any more.

“Pixel, it is our chance to finally be together,” Oliver said. She looked up at him in surprise at that.

“Is that what you really want?” Felicity said.

“What? Of course I do!” Oliver said loudly, and his girl fell into silence again.

Finally, she reached out and grabbed his hand.

“Oliver, I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything for me. I’m fine continuing as we have been," Felicity said. Oliver’s heart sank. She obviously did not feel the same for him. His face must have reflected his sadness because Felicity was quick to continue.

“I don’t mean that I don’t…I mean…Rake – you know you have never been a one-woman kind of guy,” Felicity said. “And this whole soul-matey thing is kind of like a commitment to end all commitments. I don’t want to force you into anything. I just want you to be happy.”

Oliver grabbed her face, just like last night, and kissed her again.

“Felicity Smoak…you make me happy,” Oliver said. “All those other girls, the womanizing…I’m not proud of it. And since I’ve been on the island I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I was with all of those girls I think because I wasn’t able to be with the one girl I wanted to be with.”

Felicity’s eyes went as round as saucers as he talked.

“The girl who brings a smile to my face even when I’ve been through the worst of circumstances. The girl who believes in me when no one else does. The girl who thinks I can do anything, but wants me to choose my own path. The girl who is my sunshine. You, Felicity.”

Tears were streaming down Felicity’s face. Suddenly she leaped forward and knocked them both down so that she was on top of him and his back was on the grass. This time it was her turn to grab his face and kiss him, which he enthusiastically returned. He felt the tears continue to stream down her cheeks, and he pulled back from the kiss so that he could wipe them with his thumb.

“Hi,” he whispered with a big grin.

“Hi,” she returned with a matching smile. “I kind of love you.”

“Kind of?” he replied with mock offense.

“OK, totally,” she said with a grinned as she kissed him again.

They spent several hours like that, just getting lost in each other. Felicity finally pointed out that it was getting really late in the day in her time zone and if she didn’t wake up soon, her roommates would think she was dead.

“We need to come up with a plan, though, to get you out of this place and back to Starling City so you can find me,” she said.

“We will, don’t worry. Now that I know how you feel, I will stop and nothing to make sure we can be together. She smiled at him as she faded away.

Over the next few years, Oliver endured many things to get back to civilization. He was forced to work with ARGUS in China to stop the spread of a deadly virus and to complete several other missions. One night, when he finally found a moment to sleep, she was so excited when he arrived at the dream land. Felicity practically pounced on him she saw him.

“Rake! Guess what? You are never going to believe what happened! I got a job!”

He smiled at her enthusiasm, but wasn’t really surprised that she had found gainful employment. She was a genius, after all, and he knew all the top tech companies were trying to recruit her.

“That’s so awesome, Pix! But why wouldn’t I believe that?”

“Oh, it’s not the fact that I got a job that is the surprise…it’s _where_ I got the job.”

“And where is that?” Oliver asked.

“You had better sit down for this,” she said. He sat cross legged on the grass, and Felicity sat across from him, and grabbed him. “My daytime self, who has no idea who the frak you are and what you mean to me, got a job at Queen Consolidated.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I had offers from so many places. And Queen Consolidated didn’t even pay me the most. And it’s just a position in the IT department, not even close to what I’m qualified for,” Felicity said excitedly.

“And we are excited about you taking an inferior position for lesser pay?” Oliver asked in frustration. “I know working for a company with my last name is an exciting prospect, Felicity, but I will find you, no matter where you end up. You don’t have to compromise for me.”

“That’s just the thing, Oliver. I _didn’t_ compromise, because I know nothing about you. I chose Queen Consolidated against my better judgement of my own free will,” Felicity said. “Don’t you see what this means?”

He shook his head at her.

“Oh, my Rake, it means that while I may not remember you during the day…some part of me still feels drawn to you,” she said. “It is fate! This is the first time we have tangible evidence in our real life!”

Oliver couldn’t help but smile at her excitement, and he pulled her into his arms.

“I still don’t like that you had to sacrifice so much for _fate_ or whatever this is,” he said. “But I will make it up to you someday…I promise.”

Oliver saw her once, on a mission that brought him to Starling City. His heart had skipped a beat when daytime Felicity was delivering something to the CEO's office and said his picture was cute. 

The two of them shared a laugh over that story that night. Felicity was a little sad that he had not introduced himself to her daytime self, but she understood the dangers of defying Amanda Waller. 

Oliver had a chance of re-entering society once, after China and ARGUS. But instead he had opted for a vigilante life in Coast City before Amanda Waller had found him and forced him into a mission on Lian Yu.

Felicity had given him an earful at these choices of his – not understanding why he wasn’t in a rush to get back to her like he said he was when they first learned about the dream-sharing. Finally, he had confessed his doubts about being worthy of her after all he had been through. That the Oliver that returned would not be anything that anyone would want to love. And he expressed his concerns about the dangers of being in his life.

She told him he was being ridiculous and he needed to get his as back to civilization as soon as the mission to defeat Fryers was completed. However, once the situation was resolved, Felicity did agree with him that he needed to head to Russia to keep his promise to Taiana. She would wait.

“It’s not like I even know what I’m missing during the day,” she said sadly. He held her a little tighter in his arms at that.

They had made love on several occasions in their dream world and it had been wonderful. Oliver had taken his sweet time learning her body and what made her melt into a marshmallow when he touched her. She in turn provided him comfort on the days when he didn’t know if he would survive to the next one.

After Oliver’s tumultuous time in Russia, he returned to the island, waiting to be discovered and brought home. Some of the things he did in Russia he was not proud of, but Felicity was always there to keep the light in him when he felt beyond hope.

When he was finally found by a fishing boat in the China Sea, he was both excited and nervous to return to civilization. He knew that his family had missed him, but he worried how he would be able pulling off a normal life in the day while fulfilling his promise to his father.

The one guidepost in him going home was the fact that he could finally see his girl in the flesh. He and Felicity agreed that he should take a while to seek her out, because it would seem weird if he showed up in her office without a valid reason.

So, he came home, fit awkwardly in with his family and became the Hood.  He and Felicity still met in their dreams, but he got considerably less sleep now that he was leading a double life.

Finally, he stumbled into the Deadshot case and had a laptop riddled full of bullets. Out of deference, he had asked Walter Steele for a recommendation at Queen Consolidated to help fix it, knowing already who he would recommend. Ten minutes later, he was standing outside her cubicle, looking at a beautiful blonde woman with a red pen in her mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Drop me a comment and let me know what you think. :)


	3. A League of Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver does his best to be in Felicity's life, but the version of her in his dreams urges him to move slow. This is frustrating to Oliver, and some angsty things happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am overwhelmed by the number of people who are enjoying this fic! It makes me super happy. 
> 
> A little bit of angst in this chapter...it had to happen sometime. ;) I hope you enjoy it though!

Things continued at what seemed like a snail’s pace for Oliver. He found the most random and obscure reasons to see Felicity in the day time. He could not believe she bought the ridiculous lies he was selling.

“I’m not,” she set him straight one night in their dream land. “Sports drink? Really, Rake?”

He looked sheepish for a moment, then shrugged.

“So why is she…you…helping me, then?”

“Well, she…I mean ‘I’ think you’re cute,” Felicity said.

“OK, we have to come up with a name for daytime you and night time you because this is getting kind of confusing,” Oliver said.

“I’m still me,” she said. “Ugh. This is so weird. I’m actually jealous of myself.”

“Hey don’t be,” Oliver said, pulling her in for a kiss. “I love you…both of you. Or just you…you. You are the same girl.”

An annoyed look crossed her face.

“I also am pretty tired of you lying to me…I mean, you should tell day me that you are the Green Arrow. I can handle it,” she said.

“Don’t you think it’s too soon? I want to keep you safe,” Oliver said.

“To be honest, Oliver, I’m starting to put it together myself and I think it would be better if it came from you rather than from my brilliant detective skills,” Felicity said.

He thought about what she said for several days, but it turned out that fate had a role in making that decision for him. The Hood was shot by his mother when he was trying to get information out of her and he had to find a safe place to hide when he saw Felicity’s mini cooper in the parking lot.

After she and Diggle (his bodyguard turned vigilante partner) saved his life, daytime Felicity had finally agreed to join his team.

“Yay! I’m on Team Hood!” she cheered when he met up with her later in their dream land.

“We’re not calling it that,” he said grumpily.

“Oh, I totally am,” she grinned and leaned up and kissed him. Then she punched him in the arm. “Oliver Queen, you almost _died_ today! Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”

“Pix…I told you that this life was dangerous. Chances of my getting injured are very high,” he said. “And there may come a day when I don’t make it.”

“Uh, nope, not happening,” she said. She crossed her arms, and he knew she was very close to using the loud voice.

“Felicity…”

“No, Oliver. We survived the island. We survived China and Russia. You did not come back to Starling City and finally meet me just to get killed. I will not allow that to happen,” she said.

“And how do you propose to keep me from dying?”

“I have skills, and with me, awake me, in your ear every night, I know you will be safer,” Felicity said.

They fell into a rhythm for a while. Oliver was able to cross several names off his list of names his father had given him, and they got more and more leads on something called the Undertaking. On one particular fact-finding mission that involved backing into a server at Merlyn Global and an elevator shaft, Oliver had a hard time resisting his attraction to Felicity during the day light hours.

“I mean, you have to stop with all the innuendo,” he told her later that night. “I’m going to be walking around with a permanent boner. It’s getting ridiculous.”

“Well, I...she’s really attracted to you...it just kind of pops out,” Felicity replies with a laugh. “And besides, all you have to do is go home to bed each night and I will take care of the problem for you.”

That led to a seduction and several rounds of lovemaking, which did improve Oliver’s mood a little. But if he was going to be honest with himself, the entire situation was frustrating him.

“Is daytime you feeling any kind of romantic feelings toward me, other than just lust?” he asked in desperation later when they were cuddling.

“There is definitely a crush there…but I don’t think it is anywhere close to love yet,” Felicity told him.

“If you…she…has a crush on me, can’t I just go and ask her on a date?”

“I don’t think I would say yes at this point,” Felicity said.

“Why the hell not? You said it yourself that you think I’m attractive,” he said.

She lay there quietly for a few minutes, not knowing how to respond.

“I do..it’s just…you’ve got to understand, Oliver. That version of me has not had you in her life for the past 20 something years helping her feel better. She saw her father abandon her mother. She was relentlessly picked on in school. The only guy she ever had feelings for that remotely resembled love ended up stealing her computer virus and going to prison. Where he hung himself,” Felicity said.

“The Felicity you see before you right now has had you to comfort me when I went through all of those things. I feel beautiful and ‘remarkable,’ as you tell me I am because I can see it in your eyes,” Felicity said. “The other me feels like an ugly duckling that would rather be swallowed up by a hole in the ground than interact with too many people.”

He hugged her tighter. “I told daytime you that you were remarkable,” he said in a whisper.

“Yes, you did, but daytime Felicity had never heard anything like that before and she didn’t believe you,” she replied. “If you are going to ask me on a date, at this point I would think you are pulling a prank or something patronizing like that. Right now, daytime Felicity doesn’t think she’s in your league.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s pretty much the other way around,” Oliver said, prompting her to smile.

“More like, we are each other’s league…a league of two,” Felicity said. “Look, Rake, I know this is a long process and very frustrating, but just keep being your wonderful self and I will come around…I promise.”

He sighed and pulled her into his arms, determined to keep going, no matter how hard it got.

Unfortunately, things did not get better from there. For months on end, he tried to take it slow and help daytime Felicity build her trust in him, but she never gained anything more than lust for him.

In a move of pure frustration (and drunkenness)…he had let his old girlfriend, Laurel Lance, kiss him. He pushed her away quickly, but not as soon as he should have. He felt so guilty afterwards, that he had tried to fall asleep and confess to Felicity right away, but circumstances prevented it. They learned that the Undertaking was a plan to use a device to create an earthquake that would level the Glades, the poorer part of Starling City. Oliver's mother had been involved in the plot as was his best friend Tommy's father - Malcolm Merlyn. Merlyn turned out to be the Dark Archer, and he moved up the timeline of the Undertaking to that day and Oliver had to head into combat.

Losing Tommy was the hardest thing he had ever done. He wished he had told Tommy everything, about all the horrors that happened during his time away, and about Felicity. Maybe then his best friend would not have believed he was nothing more than a murderer before he died.

After the Undertaking, he crashed in bed as soon as he could, seeking comfort in the one person who could make him feel better- Felicity. But even that didn’t last. Overcome with guilt, he had confessed what had happened with Laurel. It didn’t mean anything, it was out of pure sexual frustration (even though he was getting laid nightly in dream land, his actually physical body had been chaste since the Queen’s Gambit sank. Even though it was just a kiss, it was no excuse, he told her. He had betrayed her and was so sorry. He begged for her forgiveness.  

Seeing the hurt in her eyes was like a dagger to his heart. She told him that she needed some time to herself and promptly woke herself up, fading away from their dream land. For the next several weeks, she gave him the silent treatment each night. Between losing Tommy and this, Oliver was simply devastated. He did what he did best – ran.

He went back to Lian Yu, the place where he had begun to chance into the person he was. A person he could barely recognize anymore. Because he was on the opposite side of the world, he barely saw Felicity in his dreams anymore. He intentionally tried to avoid her to give her space. She seemed fine with it.

Finally, one night when he drifted off, she was there waiting for him, with something to say.

“Oliver, it’s time to come home,” Felicity said.

“I can’t Felicity. I can’t do it all again, I can’t be the Hood anymore,” he said. “And you want nothing to do with me, so what is the point of even trying to get your memories back?”

“I forgave you a long time ago, really, Oliver…don’t give up on us yet,” she said pleadingly.

“But you have hardly been here. You haven’t talked to me in so long!”

“Well, besides the obvious fact that we are in different time zones, daytime me is sleeping less and less trying to pick up the slack at both jobs – Queen Consolidated and our vigilante gig.”

“Felicity…”

“OK, OK, I was avoiding you. Every time I looked at you all I could think about was you kissing her and I just couldn’t deal with it. I’m a 'bury her head in the sand' kind of girl,” Felicity said.

“What makes you ready to talk about it now?”

She was quiet for a minute.

“I’m on my way, to get you,” she finally said.

“Daytime you? To Lian Yu? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

“Seriously, Oliver, have you met me? Once I get an idea in my head, it’s pretty hard to talk me out of it. Believe me, Digg tried, but I am determined to bring you back,” Felicity said.

“I’m not going back,” he said.

“So then you have to find a way to get me daytime me to live on Lian Yu with you, because so help me God, Rake, if you give up on us, I will hack you until the day that you die,” she growled.

Oliver couldn’t help the corners of his mouth tipping up into a smile.

“Oh you will, will you?”

“Yep, I’m a hacker,” she said.

Oliver laughed and pulled her into his arms. She came stiffly at first, but finally melted into him.

“Pix, I’m so sorry about what happened with Laurel. And to be honest, she kissed me. But I really should have pushed her away sooner,” he said. “I just kind of froze.”

“I think I’m ready to hear about it now, if you want to tell me the details,” Felicity said. “And please, even if it’s uncomfortable, I want to hear all of it. The only way we work as partners is by being honest.”

He nodded, then proceeded to tell her about how he went over to Laurel’s apartment to talk to her the same day that he had encouraged Tommy to make his move with her. There was a moment and his ex-girlfriend leaped at him and started to kiss him. Unfortunately, his body’s natural response was to kiss back. Finally, he realized what he was doing and pushed her away.

Laurel had made a few more attempts, and had finally taken the hint. Unfortunately, Tommy had not witnessed the pushing away part, just the kissing.

“He died hating me,” Oliver said with tears in his eyes.

“Oh Oliver,” Felicity grabbed his hands.

“Felicity…I did kiss her back, but I would give anything to take back that minute of my life,” he said.

“I’ve forgiven you, but if I see Laurel once I have my memories intact I may just punch her in the face.”

Oliver laughed.

“She will have no idea why,” he said.

“Well, she shouldn’t just go around kissing people’s boyfriends,” Felicity said.

“Boyfriend? Try soulmate.”

She smiled.

“Yeah, soulmate.”

Even though they knew they needed to come up with a game plan for daytime Felicity’s upcoming visit to Lian Yu, they spent most of their time together in each other’s arms, making up for all the time they had missed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, so, I originally was going to have Oliver sleep with Laurel but I just couldn't do it. It never felt right to me with the whole soulmate thing that he would go that far. So we had the basic kiss that lasted a minute.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Drop a comment and let me know what you think.


	4. Oliver Fracking Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Felicity Smoak doesn't know why she was drawn to work at Queen Consolidated. She also doesn't know why one Oliver Queen seems determined to be in her life. But she's not one to complain about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A whole chapter from daytime Felicity's POV! I hope you enjoy!

Oliver Queen was an enigma to her from the moment he stepped into her cubicle with that bullet-ridden laptop. He looked at her with these eyes that seemed to be drinking her in. He looked at her in a way no man ever had before.

It made her nervous…and somehow calm at the same time. One thing was for sure, it was just one of the many things in Felicity Smoak’s life that just did not make sense.

Like why she was sitting in that cubicle in the first place. She had received job offers from several top corporations in America, but she settled for a lowly IT position at Queen Consolidated. It even paid about half of what one of the other jobs had offered.

And yet, for some inexplicable reason, she felt drawn to Queen Consolidated. Maybe it was because she felt sympathy for the family when they had lost their patriarch and his son at sea so many years ago. She didn’t really pay attention to the upper portion of society’s news very much, but for some reason seeing the news about Robert and Oliver Queen gave her a sense of melancholy.

Regardless, she had come to Queen Consolidated and she was making the most of it. They had a really great Applied Sciences division, and she hoped she could transfer there someday and really be able to use her talents. Walter Steele, the CEO of QC had personally asked her to fix several of his computer issues, so she knew her skill was starting to be noticed. Her boss liked to talk the talk, but everyone on her floor knew that Felicity was the one to go to if you had a serious IT problem.

Which is why it wasn’t much of a surprise when the very much alive (and young, and handsome…ugh shut up Felcity’s brain) Mr. Oliver Queen came into her cubicle with a recommendation for tech support. When the news of Oliver’s amazing rescue on an island after five years away had been announced, cheers had echoed through the halls. Felicity had shed a happy tear, though she didn’t know why. Probably for the family, of course, because she had always been a sucker for a happy story.

When Mr. Queen, or Oliver, handed her the laptop, she noticed several bullet holes through its casing. She was from Vegas, and had seen her fair share of bullet holes in the rougher parts of town. She was not buying what Oliver was selling, but she played along because she hated mysteries and he was definitely one to solve.

And he really needed to stop looking at her like that. Like she was a glass of water in the desert. It creeped her out.

It made her whole body tingle.

Not to mention, he had the most beautiful, piercing blue eyes. Yikes, she was in so much trouble.

She quickly got the information that Oliver needed from the laptop’s hard drive and felt a little dismayed because she knew he would be leaving soon. He paused at the end of her cubicle, like he wanted to say something else, but then he changed his mind and turned to leave. She let out a breath once she heard the elevator ding to open and take him away.

Oliver. Freaking. Queen. The man was sex on a stick. She had seen older pictures of him. A few years ago she had seen one in her boss’ office and remarked about how cute he was. “Cute” did not describe the man that had come into her cubicle today. His shorter hairstyle and facial scruff added a more serious, mature look to him. And his arms…yeah…let’s just say he had filled out a bit while he was away. How was that possible on an island? She was a big fan of the show Survivor, and was pretty sure that most castaways got scrawnier the longer they were away from civilization. But not Mr. Queen. Oliver. She sighed and then forced herself to focus and get back to work.

She saw him a few more times after that. He came up with several more ridiculous lies with mysteries he needed her to solve. The origin of an arrow, the chemical makeup of a “sports drink” that came in a syringe. For some reason, he seemed to determined to be part of her life. She had once suspected that he might be the vigilante, but when he was arrested the vigilante had also been out on the town at the same time that he was at the police station.

Still, something did not add up about the man and Felicity was determined to figure out what it was. Then her boss’ boss, Mr. Steele had asked her to come to his office one day (at first she thought she was getting fired from a job she was overqualified for in the first place) and asked her to look into some things for him.

She had started digging into the information he had given her when Mr. Steele had suddenly gone missing. She took one item, a strange notebook, to Oliver and showed it to him. For some reason, she felt like she could trust him. He said it was because he just had one of those faces, but she knew there was some other reason why she felt something stir in her gut every time she was around him.

When she shook hands with him that day, a shiver went up her spine. When she met his eyes, she saw him smiling at her reaction, almost as if he expected it.

And then there was that time that he said she was “remarkable.” She told herself not to get too excited for the praise, as he was just grateful for her computer help. No one thought she was remarkable, least of all a gorgeous billionaire. Cooper might have, but Felicity was pretty sure he had been using her for her code.

One evening, she was fuming over her terrible day at work and craving that pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream in her freezer when she unlocked her Mini Cooper at the Queen Consolidated garage. She jumped when she heard a groan in the back seat and saw the vigilante, no, make that Oliver Queen, bleeding out in her car.

She was shocked, but at the same time not surprised because she had suspected it not too long ago.  “Everything about you just became unbelievably clear,” Felicity said, as she warned him not to ruin her lease with his blood and drove to his secret base of operations, the Foundry, per his instructions.

Once she was there, she realized that John Diggle was also in on his vigilante mission, which was a good thing because there was no way she was getting an unconscious Oliver down those stairs by herself.  She had a moment of panic when his heart stopped on the table, but thankfully they had restarted it. Felicity told herself that the panicky feeling was how she would react if it were anyone on that table, but her inward voice told herself that she was lying. There was something about Oliver Queen that made her feel connected to him in a way she had never felt before.

After that, she had joined his team, but told him that she would only do so if he promised to stop killing. She was surprised when he said yes, almost as if he was desperate to join the team. “I should have asked for a new car,” she laughed to herself.

They fell into an easy rhythm after that – crossing some names off of Oliver’s list and gathering more intel on the Undertaking. When Oliver took her into his arms in the elevator shaft at Merlyn Global, she could not contain the babble of sexual innuendo that inevitably poured out of her. Her cheeks were red, but glance at him, there were some unreadable emotions in his eyes.

Not lust. Never lust, right? Oliver Queen would never be into someone like her. He was more suited for people like Laurel Lance. Gorgeous Laurel. She was so beautiful and poised, and nothing like a nerdy babbling IT girl. They couldn’t be on more opposite ends of the spectrum.

So what was there in his eyes that day in the elevator shaft? She didn’t know, but as quickly as it was there, it was gone. He made a point to cut off her babbles after that. Maybe she had finally started to annoy him.

On the night of the Undertaking, Oliver had urged her to leave the Foundry before the action started, but she was determined to stay if they were staying to fight. She couldn’t believe that she missed the fact that there was a second device. As the earth shook around her, she couldn’t help but feel a little guilty over all the lives they had failed to save. Was this how Oliver felt all the time? This was awful!

The door to the Foundry was stuck due to earthquake debris, and she waited for one of her boys to come dig her out. But unfortunately, she would be here a while. Diggle was hurt, and Oliver…she heard over the comms that of course he went to check if Laurel was OK. She heard him grieving for Tommy when he died in his arms. Her heart broke for him. He didn't say much when he came to the Foundry later to let her out and make sure she was OK.

She tried to comfort him after Tommy’s funeral, but for some reason, he could not meet her eyes. And the few times he did – they were filled with guilt and regret…like he had done something to her. It made absolutely no sense.

And then he had just disappeared. He dumped a ton of money in her and Digg’s bank accounts and left for parts unknown. A sense of melancholy settled in her stomach. She carried on with her life, keeping things going in both the foundry and at Queen Consolidated, but she felt like she was living half a life. Like a piece of her was missing. Every time her heart tried to tell her that it was because Oliver was gone – she silenced those feelings.  Anything deeper with Oliver than friendship was just…unthinkable, right?

With those thoughts came a new sense of determination. Star City needed Oliver Queen – if not as the vigilante, but as himself. His company was in danger of being picked apart by corporate sharks, his mom was in jail and his sister was all alone. And as for The Hood, well she used her money to refurbish the foundry and design a new bow for Oliver, because something about it just felt right.

She dove into her search for him, scanning old video surveillance files for facial recognition. She picked him up at a Chinese airport, and other records showed he was going to board a tiny plane. She tracked the trajectory of the flight and oh no…he wouldn’t. Why would Oliver go back to the very place that had caused him so much pain in the past?

Nope, this was not happening. She booked tickets to China (two, because she knew that Digg would object to her going and when she ignored his objection would insist on going with her). The only time she had any doubts about what they were doing was when Digg told her they had to parachute out of the plane to get to the island.

Once they arrived, she had immediately screwed things up by stepping on a landmine.  Then they heard his voice and she looked up to see him swinging like Tarzan down to lift her off the mine. It was like something out of a freaking movie.

Not to mention the fact that a shirtless Oliver Queen was laying on top of her. They stared into each other’s eyes for several heartbeats. Felicity was so damn happy to see him. Their faces were so close to each other they could almost kiss.

Suddenly, a vision of sorts filled her mind of them doing just that, in a field of soft grass. The vision was so intense that it almost felt like a memory. She could remember the feel of Oliver’s lips on hers.

Confused, she looked up into Oliver’s eyes again.

“Rake…” she whispered, and he reared back in shock.

And as suddenly as it came, the vision was gone. She remembered it, but it no longer felt like it really had happened. More like a pleasant dream she might have had.

Oliver must have noticed the change in her face, because his whole demeanor changed as well. He looked deflated, like someone had stolen all his toys on Christmas morning. Felicity wanted to comfort him, but she was suddenly very aware that he was still on top of her.

“You’re so sweaty,” was all her stupid brain could come with to say. That seemed to snap Oliver out of his stupor. He just half-smiled and led them to the abandoned plane debris he was living in. She did a typical ramble about him not being happy to see them and asked for coconut water. He smiled at her, but it didn’t really reach his eyes.

Something was going on with Oliver, and she would bet money it had something to do with that vision, or dream or whatever. She never really remembered her dreams, but for some inexplicable reason, she suddenly wished she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frakety Frak! She remembered for like a second? Did you think I was going to make things easy on you guys? (insert evil laugh here) 
> 
> Just kidding, please don't hate me. ;) 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! Drop me a comment to let me know what you think. Up next - we get into season 2!


	5. Slow and steady wins the race

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver and Felicity grow closer during the day, but Slade Wilson throws a wrench into things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh! I'm so sorry it has been a few weeks since an update. Cold and flu season knocked me for a loop and then the holidays. I hope you enjoy this chapter!

Oliver listened to John and Felicity’s breathing even out as they fell asleep in his shelter. He had agreed to go home with them tomorrow. They thought it was to save Queen Consolidated and be there for Thea.

But for Oliver, it was all about that moment.

She had remembered him.

He wanted to shout it from the highest hill on this damn island. Finally, something! It gave him so much hope he thought his heart would burst from it.

And then, as quickly as it had come, the moment was gone. His Pixel was gone. But the hope was still there, along with so many questions.

Like did she love her for a minute, and then the love was gone? Was she starting to love him and that meant the memories would come back slowly, or would they all dump into her at once? He had so many questions and he knew he wouldn’t get his answers until he could talk to his Dream Felicity. But his mind was racing so much that he could not fall asleep.

Finally, when he was able to make it to dream land, Felicity was there waiting for him, and was just as excited about what had happened as he was.

“Rake, I remembered! I remembered! It was only for like a minute but it was there!” Felicity said as she threw herself into his arms. She kissed him. “And I felt you hold me in your arms. In real life!”

Oliver smiled at that and held her tighter, peppering kisses on her neck and shoulder. After several minutes, he pulled back to look at her.

“But why was it so short, Felicity? Why did it go as fast as it came?”

“I don’t know. I think for a minute when she…I was in your arms, I felt it. I was so damn happy to see you again that I let myself give into my feelings for you…love.”

“And then?”

“And then, all the doubts I have came crashing back in,” she said. “Daytime Felicity has burying her feelings for you down to an art form.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, we are so close. It happened once, let’s see if we can get it to happen again,” Felicity said. “We are returning to Starling City tomorrow, so maybe you will have more opportunity then.”

“Well, I’m not returning to the Hood…”

“Oliver…”

“No, Pix, nothing you say is going to convince me. Tommy thought I was a murderer and I am going to stop to honor him,” he said. “So if we aren’t going to see each other in our nighttime activities…what are we going to do to make sure I still see you? People are going to start becoming weirded out if I continue to go to IT every day just to talk to you.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Oooooh I have an idea!” Felicity said, and then she scrunched up her face. “But fair warning…I’m totally going to hate it.”

And as it turned out, daytime Felicity did hate it. Oliver made her his executive assistant when he was appointed CEO. She rambled on and on about how she was overqualified for the position, but finally she gave in when he convinced her it was the best for their vigilante lifestyle.

It had not taken him long to return to the Hood, or The Arrow, as he now called himself. After the fall of the Glades in the Undertaking, the city was in bad shape and he was needed more than ever. He honored Tommy by vowing to no longer kill, a promise which Felicity wholeheartedly agreed with.

He made Felicity feel better by bringing her a cup of coffee each morning, rather than the other way around as it would be with a usual assistant. It was near-torture for Oliver to be so close to Felicity all the time and her not knowing their history, but he felt their relationship during the day growing stronger. 

Life moved on after he returned. By night they fought crime in the streets, and by day they fought against Isobel Rochev, the nasty head of Stelmoor that was trying to buyout Queen Consolidated. Oliver rankled at the idea that they were co-CEOs. On a mission to Russia to rescue Digg’s ex-wife disguised as a business trip, Miss Rochev had come onto him at the hotel bar. He had pushed her away and after her rejection, she treated Felicity with even more animosity.

“I really do not like that woman,” she told him in their dream that night. “She was all over you!”

“Wait…how do you know that?”

“I went down to the hotel bar to get a drink and saw you,” she said and he stiffened. He prepared to defend himself, but she put a finger on his lips to silence him. “It’s OK, I saw her push you away. And daytime me was VERY happy about that.”

He smiled at her as she climbed over to his lap and straddle him.

“Now, Rake, you better start speaking in Russian to me,” she said.

“Oh really? Why?”

“It does something to me.”

Oliver spoke several seductive phrases in Russian to her and she practically purred in delight. They spent the rest of their dream that night enjoying  each other’s bodies, but Oliver still woke up less than satisfied.

Their lovemaking at night had always been enough to sustain him, with the hope that they would someday be together, but he grew more desperate to touch the real Felicity every day. When she was taken by Count Vertigo, his resolve almost completely snapped.

As it was, he broke his “no-kill” vow when the count had been about to harm his girl. As the man was about to jab a deadly dose of vertigo in her neck, he had unleashed several arrows into him and sent him out the window.

Oliver had been shot in the process, but he had barely felt it because he was so determined to make sure that she was OK. After that, he had to hurry back to hear his mother’s not-guilty verdict. Rather than going out with his family to celebrate, he had rushed back to the Foundry to make sure she was recovering from her experience.

The tension left his shoulders when he saw Felicity in the Foundry, feeling fine and even cracking jokes with Diggle. And then she had even tried to apologize for being the reason that he started killing again.

“There was no choice to make,” he told her, meaning it with all his heart.

After that incident (and making intense love to her in their dream state that night), he had upped his physical game with her during the day. He made a point to touch her shoulder when he came up behind her, or to sometimes grab her hands when she was talking.

If daytime Felicity noticed, she didn’t say anything. In fact, she started touching him more and more too. A hug here, an arm pat there. It was finally progressing!

“Oh, she…I definitely notice the touching,” she told him one night when he asked. “At first, I nearly had a heart attack, but now it feels normal…comforting.”

He smiled at that.

“I’m just glad that I get to touch you in some way at all during the day,” Oliver said. “It makes all of this seem more real somehow.”

At that, a little flash of pain crossed Felicity’s eyes, and he hurried to correct himself.

“Not that what we have isn’t real, Pix. It’s just, so hard to see you all day and not be able to pull you into my arms or kiss you like I’m used to,” he said.

“I know, baby, I think it will only be a little while longer,” she said. “I had another flash tonight.”

He froze and reared back at that.

“What? You didn’t think to lead with that information? When did it happen and what did you remember?”

“It was when you were shot. I was filled with such panic that you had gotten hurt, that everything came rushing back for a moment,” Felicity said. “For a moment, I knew exactly how much you meant to me and why.”

“I wonder why it is going away so quickly,” he said sadly. “Do you think we might be doing something wrong?”

“I have no idea…and it’s not like you can ask me to do an internet search on it or anything,” Felicity said. “And really, would anything be out there about this? You said that Shado told you this was folklore in her country, so maybe we are the only ones in this day and age.”

Oliver pulled her close again. “Why do you think it happened to us? Why us out of all the people in the world?”

“Maybe fate knew we belonged together, but knew you needed a little push,” Felicity said with a grin. “If not, you would still be hopping around from bed to bed in Starling.”

He frowned at her joke.

“That’s not me anymore,” Oliver said.

Felicity grabbed his face between her hands and looked him in the eye. “Oliver Queen, you never were that man. That was the man you were pretending to be. It has been my absolute privilege to be the only one who has seen the whole, wonderful, real you.”

He pulled her in for a long and slow kiss.

“You are remarkable,” he said.

“So I”ve been told,” she smiled before kissing him again.

Sara Lance coming back to town shook things up once more. First, there was the shock that she was alive in the first place. Second, she made daytime Felicity feel very insecure about where she fit on Team Arrow.

“She’s so tough and beautiful. She can go out there and guard your back at night,” Felicity told him in the dream world one night. “And she’s smart too, so she takes up my part of the team in that area too.”

Oliver held her tightly and told her she was irreplaceable, but he could tell from the look in daytime Felicity’s eyes that she did not feel irreplaceable. When the Clock King attacked and blew out all of their servers, Felicity was really hard on herself. Oliver overheard Diggle try to reassure her about her place on the team, but he had a feeling it fell on deaf ears.

Observing her the past few days, and from some of the things Felicity had told him in the past – he was 100 percent sure that the reason Felicity was not admitting her feelings to herself about loving him was because of her self-confidence. He racked his brain to find ways to show her just how amazing she was.

Then, she did a stupid, brave thing. She tried to hack into the Clock King’s system on location at the bank. They were attacked, of course, and though she had been able to defeat the villain with her amazing tech skills, she had been shot in the process.

It had taken everything in Oliver not to stitch her up himself to make sure she was OK, but Diggle and Sara being in the room forced him to be a gentleman and turn his head away while Sara tended to the wound and helped her dress in one of Oliver’s shirts. He moaned inwardly at the sight of her in his shirt.

Once she was done with her stitches, she sauntered over to him, clearly loopy on the “Aspirin” Diggle had given her. Since Digg (and dream Felicity) had told him about her insecurities now that Sara was on the team, he cupped her cheek and told her that she would always be his girl. For just a second, he saw that flash of recognition in her eyes like what had happened on Lian Yu, but just the same as before it was gone almost immediately.

This broke Oliver’s heart a little, but dream land Felicity was hopeful about it. Progress, she called it. When Slade Wilson arrived in town and started turning their lives upside down, Oliver started pulling away from Felicity during the daytime to protect her. He heard an earful about it in his dreams each night, but he was determined to keep her safe. Slade was blaming Oliver for the death of Shado on the island, and he would not stop until he believed Oliver had suffered the same amount of loss. 

When Slade killed his mother, Felicity held him in her arms in their dreams while he cried. And then she helped him pull himself together to return to fighting. They finally found a cure for the Mirakuru drug that was giving regular men super strength that they used to destroy the city on Slade’s behalf. Oliver was so discouraged and was starting to believe that they could not defeat Slade.

And then his beautiful, wonderful and remarkable Felicity (the daytime version) gave him a pep talk in the clock tower that rivaled anything the dream time version would ever give. He wanted to grab her and kiss her right then, but he held himself back.

The plan to defeat Slade actually was dream Felicity’s idea, and Oliver was against it.

“It’s going to break your heart,” he said.

“My heart is strong and can take it,” she replied. “It’s the only way we can defeat him.”

So, despite his better judgement, he had taken Felicity to the Queen Mansion and told her how he really felt about her. “He took the wrong girl,” he told her about Slade thinking Laurel was the girl he loved. And he had kissed her.

The kiss was amazing. If he thought kissing her during the dreams was wonderful – this blew all of those out of the chart. He felt it in every nerve in his body. And when Felicity kissed him back, he wanted to shout with joy. But unfortunately, many lives would be lost if they did not continue on their mission. He could see the memories start to come back to her when they pulled away from their kiss. She looked at him with recognition, then sadness.

“Rake…you have to do it…” Felicity said.

“Pix, you won’t get over it…I’ll never get you back,” he said, a sob catching in his throat.

She reached up and kissed him, and he slipped the syringe into her hand. When he pulled away from the kiss, he could see the doubts about his feelings appear in her eyes, and he knew Pixel was gone and a very insecure and hurt Felicity was in her place.

“Do you understand,” he asked pleadingly, and with sad eyes, she nodded yes.

Slade had kidnapped her shortly after and Oliver was filled with panic. This was a stupid plan. How could he have put the woman he loves in this position? If anything happened to her, he would not be able to talk to her during the day or in his dreams. She would be gone forever. He forced himself to calm down and stick with the plan that Felicity had put into place.

When he walked into the meeting location that Slade had demanded, he saw her being held with a sword to her neck. His heart was beating at an alarming rate when he begged Slade to let her go. It may have stopped beating for a moment when Felicity made her move and stabbed Slade with the Mirakuru cure syringe.

Felicity managed to get out of the building as he fought Slade, and he was able to focus on the task at hand once she was safe. Without the boost of super strength, Slade was weaker and Oliver defeated him. Keeping his promise to Tommy to not kill, they quickly loaded him on a plane to Lian Yu.

On the long ride there, he tried to catch Felicity for a conversation, but she would not look him in the eye. He knew the ruse (which was only a ruse in her eyes) to defeat Slade had broken her heart. She truly believed that Oliver had been lying when he said that he loved her.

He had no idea how he was going to win her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, I know it may annoy some that Season 2 whipped by so quickly, but it does slow WAY down from here. Chapter 6 and beyond start with Unthinkable and the story ends in Chapter 12 at the end of Season 3. So hang in there, much more fun to come! :) 
> 
> Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of the chapter. I hope you all are enjoying the holidays!


	6. Unthinkable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daytime Felicity reacts to the whole "Unthinkable" situation, and Oliver may have reached his breaking point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there! Hope everyone had a good NYE and New Year's Day! One out of three of my kids made it to midnight (and was a hot mess the next day). 
> 
> This is a short chapter, and we get daytime Felicity's POV after the Slade takedown. And it is far from pleasant. 
> 
> Also, there is some angst!

Felicity had always thought of herself as a strong woman. Sure, she would melt down every once in a while over a pint of mint chocolate chip, but she prided herself on her general ability to keep it together during times of stress.

Which is why she was concerned that she was getting so close to her breaking point. She had done an amazing job so far not letting her feelings for Oliver grow beyond a close friendship, with the occasional lust over the Salmon ladder.

But when Oliver had taken her to the Queen Manor, indicated that she was the woman he loved and KISSED her, all her resolve had started to crack. And that kiss, oh my God, she had never felt anything like that in her life. You can’t fake that kind of passion, can you? Well, apparently you can, because when he pulled away from kissing her, he had shoved a syringe in her hand and asked if she understood.

Oh she understood, all right. He was using her to get close to Slade and use the serum to weaken him. No other feelings attached. She could have kicked herself for actually believing for a moment that he had feelings for her.

After Slade was defeated, Oliver had tried to talk to her. She knew he was going to look at her with those puppy dog eyes and beg her to forgive him for not letting her in on the plan. And say that he had not told her because he had to make it look real. She knew all that was coming, and she was sure she would forgive him eventually, but she knew that if she heard any of that right now she would have an epic meltdown. And she did not want to do that in front of Oliver, Diggle and even their prisoner.

She skillfully avoided him on the plane ride to Lian Yu, keeping busy on her computer, or talking to Diggle. But she could feel his eyes always on her. She felt it like a weight on her soul.

They dropped Slade off in the new ARGUS prison on the island. Diggle and Felicity stayed on the beach while Oliver went down to have a final conversation with the villain. Once they were alone, Diggle studied her closely.

“I’m fine, Digg,” she said through her teeth.

“Felicity, don’t try that with me. I know that you aren’t,” Diggle said. “For the record, I was against this plan from the beginning.”

She looked at him with hurt in her eyes.

“You knew that this was going to happen and you didn’t tell me?” Felicity said. “You and I have always been a team within the team, Digg. I can’t believe you sided with Oliver.”

“It wasn’t about siding with him, it was just that this was the only way I could see to defeat Slade,” Diggle said with a sad sigh. “Oliver convinced me that telling you would make it less convincing. I’m so sorry.”

Felicity sat down in the sand and stared into the ocean.

“You know, it was probably five years of hell for Oliver here, but without the threat of death, this beach is actually very beautiful,” she said.

Digg seemed to sense that she needed time, so he dropped the conversation and plopped down next to her and watched the waves as well. After a few minutes, Felicity leaned her head on his shoulder. No matter what happened, Diggle would always be like a brother to her.

When Oliver came out of the underground prison area, they stood up and met him down the beach. Oliver and Diggle shared a look and carried out a silent conversation that had Felicty rolling her eyes. Diggle took the hints Oliver was laying down and gave the two of them a moment alone.

She and Oliver were silent for a moment, and finally he brought up the incident at the Queen Mansion. She brushed it off and said that she knew all along about the plan. Because thinking that the two of them could ever be together was “unthinkable,” right?

Oliver just stared at her in silence for a moment, and Felicity wondered what the battle was that was going on in his mind. Losing patience with him, she started to walk away down the beach toward the plane.

He reached over and grabbed her elbow and spun her around. She felt his warm hands cupping her cheeks and his bright blue eyes were dangerously close to her. What the heck was he doing? Stay strong, resolve, stay strong! She kept repeating that to herself.

Then Oliver completely shocked her by saying “Fuck it,” and leaning in to press his lips against hers. She froze for a moment, and then her resolve betrayed her and she completely melted into him. When she returned his kiss, he put his hand on the back of her head and deepened his angle on her mouth.

Again, she felt flashes of that dream kiss hit her again, and she wondered why it was so real to her. The memory startled her so much that it allowed her brain to focus again and she forced herself to pull away from Oliver. Suddenly, other flashes entered her mind, of other kisses.

“Oliver…what…” she started to ask him, but he cut her off with another kiss. She allowed herself a moment to enjoy it before pulling back again.

“OK, mister. I’m totally into this kissing thing, but we need to talk about it before it happens again,” she said as she walked back a few steps from him. “I’m going to stand over here and you’re going to stay over there and we are going to talk.”

He made a forlorn face and let her go so she could back up a few paces.

“OK, now, I’m breathing, you’re breathing. I’m OK, you’re OK,” she said. She bit her lip to keep herself from babbling further and focus. Why had Oliver kissed her? What were those flashes of dreams that popped in her heard when he did? They had to be dreams, because she was 100 percent sure none of that had really happened. Had it?

She looked over at Oliver, who was staring at her intently, waiting for her to speak. And he was also looking at her in a way that confused her…like he trying to see something in her.  After a moment, he seemed to realize that whatever he was looking for wasn’t there and he just…deflated. Felicity didn’t know what was wrong with him, but her heart broke to see him hurting.

“Oliver…what is going on?”

“I wasn’t supposed to kiss you, but I was just hoping that if I did…it would fix everything?”

“Not supposed to? What are you talking about? And what needs fixing? Do you think I’m mad over your ruse to bring down Slade? Because if that’s the case, I don’t think a kiss is going to help with that whole situation,” Felicity said.

Oliver covered his face with his hands and rocked in place for a few minutes. She could hear him murmuring to himself.

“I don’t know what the hell to do. I fucked up. I don’t think I can take this anymore,” he said.  “I’m done.”

“Oliver!” She said, her voice entering the loud volume. “What is wrong with you?”

He stared at her for another minute before he just shut himself off. His eyes lost their emotion and his shoulders tightened. When he started speaking, it was in his fake “Oliver Queen” persona, and not the Oliver she was used to seeing.

“Felicity, I’m so sorry that I used you to take you down Slade and for kissing you just now. I should not have done that, it was inappropriate,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

Her heart sank. She knew it. She knew none of this could be real.

“Why?” The whispered word escaped on its own volition.

He looked at her with sad eyes.

“Because of the life that I lead… I just think it's better to not be with someone that I could really care about,” he said, closing his eyes.

Felicity held back tears and walked past Oliver towards the plane. He had murmured to himself that he couldn’t take it anymore…that he was done.

Well, she didn’t know what he meant by that, but she did no one thing.

She was done too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh no! The angst! Has Oliver really given up? Tune in next time! This chapter makes me feel sad for our two. Maybe I will post an update sooner than usual to cheer us all up. :)


	7. Cold turkey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver tries to cut ties with Felicity, and it doesn't work out so well for them. Meanwhile, dealing with Malcolm Merlyn and Ra's al Ghul complicate matters more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More angst in this chapter, but a few developments. Hope you enjoy!

Oliver watched as Felicity walked away from him and pressed his fingernails into his palm, making them bleed, to keep himself from calling her back to him. He had to stick to his resolution. He was done. As much as he loved Felicity, both during the day and the night…he just couldn’t do this anymore. 

He couldn’t hold her only in his dreams. He couldn’t kiss her and not see the girl he loved his whole life in her eyes. To be honest, kissing her had felt a little like he was also cheating on her. He loved both Felicities, but right now they felt like two different people.

He was such an idiot for kissing her on the beach in the first place. He just thought that if he gave into his feelings, it would bring everything back to her. And it almost had. For a moment there, he could see her processing new information in her brain and it confusing her. “This is it…it’s happening,” he had thought. But as he watched her, the memories did not keep trickling in and “his” Felicity was not there with him.

And it broke him. He knew at that point there was no more hope in this situation because nothing they had tried had worked. Daytime Felicity had feelings for him, of that, he was sure, but he didn’t understand what was going wrong that it did not turn into love. And if it didn’t happen by now, it was probably never going to happen.

He sighed and walked back to the plane. Diggle met his gaze with a look that indicated he held Oliver completely responsible for Felicity’s mood. He glanced over at her and saw her curled in a seat, listening to something with headphones and her iPod, and not making eye contact with anyone. Oliver gave Digg an apologetic look and took his seat toward the back of the plane…far enough away so Felicity wouldn’t have to look at him unless she turned around and angled her head quite a bit. But he got a clear view of her.

On the long flight back…Felicity fell asleep. He was tempted to follow her and dream with her one last time. To explain to his Pixel why he needed some time to get over his feelings so they could just be friends.  To maybe kiss her one last time.

But he forced himself to stay awake. He needed to make a clean break. That was the best way he could force himself to stop loving her.

After they returned from Lian Yu, to say things were strained would be an understatement. Felicity had told them she needed time off from the Arrow team, not to mention she got a job as a tech support clerk at a computer store. They saw her less and less. Diggle opted to take on some of Lyla’s ARGUS assignments while she took leave during her pregnancy.

Oliver, now broke (after Slade and Isobel Rochev stole his company from him) and alone…sat in the Foundry by himself every night and tried to figure out what he was going to do with his life. It was so depressing, but he was firm in his resolve that things needed to change. His team needed to move on and he did too.

But moving on was hard when he spent a lot of time watching Felicity. He would don his Arrow suit and sit outside her window every night to watch her sleep. He wondered what she was thinking in dream land now that she was there every night without him. Did she miss him? Was she lonely?

He forced those thoughts away. He was doing this for her own good, as well as his own. Being with him is a safety hazard. Besides…daytime Felicity subconsciously had never allowed herself to date once they had started their dream romance. He and Pix both guessed it was because some part of her knew that her heart was taken.

Maybe now that he was leaving her alone, she would find someone that made her happy. The thought made his jaw clench. As much as the idea of her with someone else tore at his gut, he knew that it was the best for her.

So he placated himself with watching her sleep. But it served another purpose. Since he no longer had a job, he could sleep during the day. As Felicity started to stir each morning, he would take that as his cue to go back to the Foundry to sleep.

His time in the dream world did not provide any kind of solace. He sat alone there all day while he was sleeping, staring at the sky and missing her.

He continued in this existence for a while…not really living, not really dead. And then when Sara died, everything changed. The team stood around the fallen Canary and were united once again to find the killer. Then the League of Assassins showed up and demanded the blood debt for the murder of one of their members – Sara Lance.

The shocking news came that it was Thea that had committed the unspeakable act, under a drugged state induced by Malcolm Merlyn. It forced Oliver to offer himself up on behalf of his sister to fulfill the blood debt – in the form of a fight to the death with the League’s leader, Ra’s Al Guhl.

Felicity was not on board with this plan and she told him so…loudly. But when it was finally time to go, she did not put up too much of a fight.

“I wish you wouldn't go, but I know you better so I'm not going to ask you to stay,” she said, resigned.

As he was leaving to face his death, he realized how foolish he had been. He had given up on the one thing that had given his life meaning.  He finished packing his bag and told her there were two things he knew for sure. One was that he was a man who would do anything for his sister.

He started to walk out and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“And the second?” she asked.

“I love you,” he responded.

He walked up the stairs and headed out the door, but not before he heard a faint whisper. “I love you too.” His step paused. She loved him? Months' worth of anxiety and stress washed away. He wanted to run to her and kiss her, but he was fighting with the other part of him that needed to save Thea. He would do what he had to do to get her out from under this blood debt.

And then he would do everything he had to get his girl back.

But things did not worked out like he planned. He lost. He died. Or so he thought. In those last few moments, as Ra’s sword cut through his chest, he saw all the people important to him. Felicity was the last face he saw before he was pushed off the mountain side. She was so beautiful. She was his light. And he had failed her.

He came to slowly in a cabin, and he saw his friend Tatsu nursing him back to health. He drifted in and out of consciousness for several days. Not sleeping, because he never dreamed. Finally, his body started to heal and he was more awake and alert during the day. That night, he drifted off to sleep and finally entered his dream land…but Felicity was not there.

Every time he fell asleep, he hoped he would see her, but she was never there. During the slow hours and days it took for his body to heal, Oliver started to worry. Had something happened to her? Was the team just putting in extra hours in the vigilante business to cover for his absence? Was she unconscious…or God forbid…dead? He panicked at the thought, and immediately tried to get out of bed, but his friend pushed him back down. She said he needed to heal or he would be no good to anyone.

He agreed with regret, but as the days passed he grew more and more anxious about Felicity’s whereabouts. After several weeks, he was finally healed. He knew his city still need him, but there was only one person who he would stop at nothing to return to. He just hoped she was in one piece when he arrived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh goodness, daytime Felicity loves Oliver! And she's now missing from dream land? What the heck is going on! Tune in next time! :) 
> 
> I will try to speed up my posting schedule in the next week, because I have surgery on Thursday and I would like to get a bunch of it posted before then. 
> 
> Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of this update!


	8. Waking up is hard to do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Felicity realizes that she loves Oliver not only in her dreams...but what does that mean for the connection between them? And will he return from his fight with Ra's al-Ghul?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Early update! 
> 
> I'm so excited for you to read this chapter. That's all I'm going to say! Enjoy!

Felicity stood in shock for a moment when Oliver said his “I love you” before he left to fight Ra’s al Ghul. When she recovered, she whispered “I love you too,” but he was already gone. The minute the words left her mouth, a sharp pain stabbed at her forehead. She sat down quickly when the pain was accompanied by dizziness.

Like they had in the past, flashes of moments with Oliver that she did not remember started going through her mind. Only this time was different. This time she did remember them. Oh God. They were real. It was all real.

Memory after memory penetrated her brain, and the speed at which they arrived was what was causing the searing pain in her head. Diggle and Roy came down the stairs and rushed over to her when they saw the state she was in. Felicity heard his voice asking if she was OK, but it was muffled, as if he was behind glass.

One by one, dream by dream, the memories poured in. Diggle picked her up and carried her to the med table to lay her down. She heard him to tell Roy to call 911, but she reached out to Diggle and shook her head. She leaned her head back against the cool of the med table and let everything soak in. Once she stopped resisting what was happening, the influx of memories went smoothly.

She remembered him being annoyed with her when she was a small girl, trailing around the dream world after him. She remembered crying on his shoulder when her dad left. Complaining to him about the kids at schools. Hugging him tightly when she received a full ride to MIT.

God, she had shared every moment of her life with Oliver. Her Oliver.

Their first kiss. Long nights of holding hands and staring up at the sky. Telling each other everything. Comforting him during his island suffering. The first time they made love. Her faint whisper of love for him a few moments ago was nothing compared to the song that bellowed from her heart. She loved Oliver Jonas Queen. Always had, and always would. 

She sat up. She loved him…and she was livid with him. She remembered everything, including the lonely nights for the past several months after that fateful day at the beach. The one when he decided that he could no longer fight for them.

She scowled and was tempted to chase after him and use her loud voice at the airport. Did he even love her anymore? He had not been to the dream since that day. No, he loved her…he had just told her so. But knowing him, he was probably  thinking that it was what was best for her. He was annoying like that.

With a huff she hopped off the med table.

“Whoa, there, Felicity, do you think you should be doing that?” Diggle asked. “A minute ago you were barely conscious.”

“I’m fine, Diggle, I just had a really bad migraine. Lying down was just what I needed. Thank you,” she lied. Digg’s eyes narrowed. He knew she was lying, but after she shot him a pleading look, he dropped the subject.

“I’m just going to head home and go to bed,” Felicity said. “I will take the day off tomorrow too.”

Digg wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to driving her home to make sure she made it OK. He gave her a hug and told her that he and Lyla would be there for her if she needed anything.

She walked into her apartment and for some reason, it did not feel like home.

“That’s because your home is on his way to fight a battle to the death,” she mumbled to herself. Emotionally spent, she fell into her bed and was asleep immediately. Strangely, she did not dream at all.

When she awoke the next day, she smiled because she could remember how it felt to be in Oliver’s arms. She could remember the first time he told her he loved her. She lay there for a few minutes and appreciated that nighttime Felicity and daytime Felicity were now the same person. She felt whole…well as whole as she could be without her soulmate on the same continent.

Oliver. She was still so angry with him, but all she wanted was to see him right now. She wanted him to share in the excitement that they had finally done what they had set out to do. They had a lifetime of memories that they now shared. She would probably yell at him for several hours and make him sleep on the couch for several nights. But at least he would be here.

Felicity wondered why she had not dreamt at all last night. She had hoped she would have been able to catch him as he was about to wake up or seen him this morning just before she was. But nothing. She didn’t even remember being in their dream land at all.

It dawned on her that she finally could do what Oliver had failed to do all these years – research what had happened to them.

Happy to have something to do, she rushed over to her laptop and pulled up searches on dream sharing and soulmates. Once she got past basic search engines, there was surprisingly a lot of information. She was able to hack into a government-funded research study from overseas on the phenomenon. There were several folk tales about it in many cultures…which was usually an indicator that it had some elements of truth to it. From what she read, most of what Shado had told Oliver was accurate.

She found hundreds of research notes on interviews with people who had similar experiences, and spent the next several hours reading stories from around the world. She ordered in Chinese for lunch and even ate the leftovers for dinner, not wanting to pull herself away from the information she was reading.

It was amazing to see so many stories of soulmates who had found each other and actually were able to fall in love and get all their memories back. Many more of the posts were from halves of dream sharing pairs whose partner did not remember them during the day and they had no way of connecting.

Still others had tried to confront the daytime versions of themselves and they had been rejected due to the no memories thing and they lost all hope of ever being able to connect with them during the daytime hours. She was really glad that she and Oliver had decided that he shouldn’t try to find her when they were younger. She definitely would have freaked out and gotten a restraining order on him.

Felicity spent the most time in the stories about those who had connected with their soulmates and gotten their memories back. She learned why she hadn’t appeared in dream land last night. Apparently once a soulmate pair is united in the day time, the dream sharing stops until they are fully bonded.

The more time they spent together and became physically intimate, the stronger their bond would grow, both physically and mentally. They would be able to share other things with their minds, besides dreams.

“Whoa, that is so trippy,” Felicity told her empty apartment. She could not imagine sharing thoughts with Oliver. She laughed as she imagined it would be very much like how they talk. She would have all these rambling thoughts, and he would be Mr. Solemn most of the time. She could not wait to get inside that brain of his.

She reached out with her feelings a bit to see if they had any lingering connection now that she could possibly tap into, but she got nothing. She sighed. She just hoped he was OK. After her day of being a hermit, she decided it was time to continue with her life until Oliver returned. She returned t her job at Palmer Tech. She was so annoyed that Ray Palmer, who had convinced the board to his buyout offer of Queen Consolidated rather than giving the CEO position back to Oliver, tried to flirt with her all the time.

He didn’t really know that she was already spoken for, but it was still annoying. She wanted no man’s touch but Oliver’s. She was working in the Foundry one night with Diggle and Roy when she felt a sudden burst of pain in her abdomen. She screamed and clutched her stomach.

“Felicity! What is it?” Diggle shouted.

“It’s Oliver! Something’s wrong! He’s hurt,” Felicity said.

“How do you know?”

Felicity gritted her teeth and scowled at her friend. “It’s a really long story that I don’t really want to talk about while I’m writhing in pain, Digg.”

She sat down in the chair and waited for the pain to pass. This was Oliver they were talking about. He healed relatively quickly. As quickly as the pain came, it was gone and Felicity felt something else…well really, nothing else. She felt completely empty inside…hollowed out.

She looked up at Digg, tears forming in her eyes.

“It’s Oliver…I think he’s dead.”

Roy and Diggle stared at her in shock.

“What? Felicity…it’s time you started telling us what the hell is going on,” Diggle said.

It took her about an hour to explain everything to her friend and to get him to believe their story. Diggle always took a while to come around to things that didn’t happen in the natural world. Roy, however, believed her right away. She looked at him and had a funny feeling that Roy knew much more about dream sharing than he was letting on. She wondered if he had a dream connection with Thea.

Diggle sat in silence for a few moments, and Felicity just stared at him, waiting for him to speak.

“I guess this makes some sense,” he said. “A lot of things are becoming clear.”

Felicity was so glad to finally have someone to share her feelings with, she jumped up and hugged both men.

“What do you mean things are becoming clear?” she asked.

“Well, why Oliver always insisted on coming back to you with ridiculous technical stuff and outlandish lies…and how you somehow didn’t call him out on them,” Diggle said. “And you two have had a crazy connection from the beginning, even if you didn’t have all your memories.”

“I thought you two were totally married at first,” Roy said, causing Felicity to roll her eyes at them, despite the fact that they had been filled with tears a few minutes ago.

“So do you think Oliver is really dead?” Digg asked sadly. She nodded and they all sat quietly for a few minutes. The pain in her heart was almost more than she could bear. 

Felicity allowed herself exactly one week to bury herself in her grief. Her sorrow was made worse a few days after Oliver’s death when Malcolm Merlyn showed up with the sword still covered with the love of her life’s blood.

For seven days, she lay in her bed, blocking the world out. She cried, she slept, she stared off into nothingness. Diggle stopped by a few times to make sure she ate and took a shower, but he mostly left her alone to her sadness. She could tell he was hurting too, but she didn’t have the emotional energy to help him either.

After the seven days, she cleaned herself up and threw herself back into life. She buried herself into her work at Palmer Tech. At night, she ran comms for the team as they tried to keep Oliver’s legacy alive and protect the streets of Starling City. Slowly, her heart began to heal. She felt so lonely without Oliver, but she knew she could continue without him. He had always believed in her and she was determined to make him proud.

Much as she was not interested in dating, in the spirit of moving on she said yes when Ray Palmer asked her on a date. It had gone OK. He had mostly talked about his dead fiancée and she could not stop mentioning Oliver Queen. They had a bittersweet laugh at the end of the date, and decided that neither of them were ready to move on and they were best suited as friends.

Palmer rewarded all of her hard work by making her the vice president of Palmer Technology. She was shocked when she heard. From IT specialist to CEO assistant to Vice President. Her career sure took many interesting turns.

She was working in the Foundry one night, guiding the team as they tried to dissolve some riots downtown. Suddenly, all eyes turned toward the source of an arrow that landed in the middle of the crowd. The Arrow had returned.

Felicity gasped and her heart started racing. Oliver? Alive? She had felt him die! Maybe it was an impostor of some sort, wearing his suit. But no…once he spoke she knew it was him. Tears of joy ran down her face.

When he finally walked down the steps of the bunker, she ran to him and leaped into his arms. He hugged her with the reserve he always had for daytime Felicity until she leaned into him and whispered into his ear. “Welcome Home, Rake.”

He looked at her incredulously.

“Pix? It’s you?”

She nodded and he pulled her in for a kiss. They were lost in each other for several minutes until they heard throats clearing behind them and it was a reminder that they were not alone. They pulled apart, and Oliver tucked her hair behind her ears and just stared at her like a man starved.

“I can’t believe it’s you. All of you. Here,” he whispered. She hugged him as he turned to the rest of the group and gave his greeting. He had returned, and his friends had kept the city safe in his absence. He had the woman he loved finally in his arms.

He couldn’t imagine life getting much better than this…until it got much worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The moment you were all waiting for! Felicity remembers all! I hope it was all you wanted and more. :) But remember, he still was a jerkface and his soulmate is mad at him. And there is also the fact that we have the rest of Season 3 to get through. Still some more angst ahead.


	9. The bond grows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Felicity is not on board with Oliver's plans against Ra's al Ghul. And they figure out why they are not meeting in dreams anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! I'm back, slowly recovering from my surgery! Thanks to everyone for their well wishes. Hope you all enjoy this chapter.

Their reunion was cut short with talk of what to do once Ra’s al Ghul found out that Oliver was alive. They all knew that he would come after them. Everyone in the foundry flipped their lid at Oliver’s plan to partner with Malcolm Merlyn to bring down the leader of the League of Assassins.

But no one was angrier than Felicity Smoak. She stormed out of the Foundry, and Oliver was quick to follow her. He didn’t know if it had anything to do with their soulmate connection, but he could feel the rage seething off of her, connecting with something in the back of his mind.

“Felicity…” he started to say once he caught up with her outside.

“Don’t,” she demanded. “You know, I thought things would be different when I got all my memories back. I thought that now that you are alive again, we could be true partners, during the day and the night.”

“We can…everything has changed with us,” he said.

“After Slade…you decided on your own that this was too difficult for us to endure any longer. You made the decision to cut off the connection between the two of us without even discussing it with me. You didn’t even say goodbye,” she said, crying now. It was like a punch in Oliver’s gut.

“And you know what the funny part of it is? I was so angry with you, but I was already halfway to forgiving you because I’m just so happy that we can be fully together now,” she cried. “But now you are making this decision, once again on your own, to work with Malcolm Merlyn. That’s not how a true partnership works.”

“Felicity, we need him to find a way to defeat Ra’s,” Oliver pleaded.

“We could have found a way together,” she said. “But to work with him of all people? How many nights did I sit with you and listen to you worry about that man abusing Tommy? Not to mention all the lives he took with the Undertaking. He is evil.”

He told Felicity that he needed to work with Malcolm to destroy Ra’s and protect Thea. That he did what he had to do to save the people that he loves. She listed off all the things he had done _to_ the people he loved over the years, each sentence like another knife stab into his heart.

And then she completely obliterated it.

“I don’t want to be a woman that you love,” she said as she turned and walked away.

Oliver just stood there in the alley staring after her, crushed. He couldn’t believe that he finally got her, but had lost her. It was almost too much to bear.

He threw himself into his training with Merlyn to defeat Ra’s al Ghul. Felicity still supported Team Arrow in the Foundry, but was MIA when it came to off hours. She made it clear that she needed some time away from him, so he was determined to give it to her. He felt so lonely because he not only lost his best friend during the day, but she was no longer there for them each night when he dreamed.

His dreams were now filled with nightmares of his time on the island, of all the things he had done in the past, of his near death on the side of the mountain, of Felicity driving out of Starling City one day and never returning. That was his biggest fear.

Roy had let it slip that she had gone on a date with Ray Palmer while he had been “dead,” and that had given him a panic attack. He had to do something to ensure that he wouldn’t lose her forever, but he had no idea what it would take to get her to forgive him.

And then Ra’s al Ghul had arrived in town and suddenly, he didn’t have time to worry about the status of his relationship. The Demon’s Head said that he wanted Oliver to be his heir. To leave his life behind and join the league of assassins.

When Oliver declined, he started a campaign to force Oliver into submission. He killed several innocent people and blamed it on the Arrow. He told the police Oliver’s true identity. Oliver had turned himself in, but Roy had sacrificed himself by pretending to be the Arrow and landing in prison. Roy faked his death and went into hiding in another city.

It wasn’t until something completely unimaginable happened – Ra’s stabbing Thea – that Oliver finally agreed with his request to join the League in order to save his sister’s life. He knew Felicity was not on board with this plan, but she borrowed the corporate plane from Palmer and agreed to go with him. One the plane, he didn’t know how he felt it, but a calmness radiated from her, as if she was trying to lend him her strength.

She brought him a blanket and they talked about how much he cared for his sister. After that, they were silent for a while when he finally decided to bring up a subject that had been weighing between them for several months.

“I don’t see you in dreams anymore,” he said. “Are you not sleeping? Are you waiting until I’m awake? I deserve that.”

She reached over and grabbed his hand. Her brightness filled him instantly.

“Oliver, I’m not dreaming of you anymore either, it what is supposed to be happening,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Well, after I…woke up for lack of a better term…I was able to do some research finally about our dream sharing. According to all the legends, once the couple finally connects in real life, the dreams stop for a while.”

“For a while?” he asked hopefully. He definitely wanted to visit dream world with her again.

“Yes…and there will be more forms of connection. The closer we are to completing our final soulmate bond, the more our minds will connect, during the day and at night,” she said. “That’s why I can know how you’re feeling most of the time. Your emotions kind of radiate into me.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“That has been happening to me too! I know when you are mad, sad, happy…and touching you like this instantly makes me feel better,” Oliver said.

“Me too,” she said softly staring at their joined hands.

“How long have you been feeling a connection?” he asked.

“Since I got all my memories back,” she said. She whispered her next few words, not looking up to him. “I felt you die.”

Grief slammed into Oliver as he sucked in a breath.

“Oh my God, Felicity. I’m so sorry…”

“You have nothing to apologize for, you were doing what you had to do for Thea,” she said, gripping his hand tighter. “But now that you are joining the League, can we try to avoid a repeat performance?”

He couldn’t help it; he pulled her in for a hug, savoring the feeling of her in his arms again. He was surprised that she didn’t pull away. He could feel peace and happiness radiating off of her, and it filled him with hope, that she might possibly have forgiven him.

The thought also filled him with sadness. Why did this have to happen now, when they had so little time left? Felicity seemed to sense his sadness and snuggled deeper into him.

“Stop thinking,” she murmured into his chest. “It’s going to be alright, even when it isn’t. Things always come around to the way they are supposed to be.”

They sat their snuggling for an hour. No one dared to disturb them, except John gave him a nod of approval when he walked by on his way to have a chat with the pilot. Oliver and Felicity’s feelings connected and joined together in a bubble of contentment. He wondered if it would always be like this for them.  He reviewed everything Felicity had told him about their mental connection and one thing stuck out.

“Felicity, what did you mean by complete the bond?” he asked, and she sat straight up out of his lap.

“Well…um…” she turned beet red before burying her face in his lap again.

“What is it?”

“We will complete our bond mentally when we complete it physically,” she murmured into his shirt.

“Physically?”

“Yeah,” she said, not lifting her head.

It took him longer than he cared to admit to dawn on him what she was saying.

“You mean we have to have sex?” he asked, trying to force his body not to become instantly excited to fulfill this part of their bonding. Felicity nodded into his chest.

“I mean, we don’t _have_ to have sex,” she said. “We just have to if we want to complete the bonding.”

“Felicity, can you please sit up?” he asked and she shook her head. “Please let me look at you.”

Finally, she sat up and raised her eyes reluctantly to him.

“Why are you so nervous to talk about this? Do you not want to complete the bond?” he asked, suddenly unsure of himself.

“No, Oliver, I do! It’s just, I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything you don’t want to do. And we already know from our kissing that it feels _a lot_ different from how it is in our dream world,” she said. “I’m not very experienced in that area and I…”

He stopped her rambling with a kiss.

“Felicity, when you and I finally make love in real life, it is going to be amazing, just like it was in the dream world,” he said. “You and I were literally made for each other, and I cannot wait to finally be with you.”

She kissed him again, with much more passion this time.

“Pix, you are going to have to stop that if you don’t want this soulmate connection thing to happen on this plane with an audience of our closest friends,” he said with a laugh.

She settled for snuggling into him again. They passed the rest of the flight in silence, enjoying their time together before their world came crashing down.

When they arrived at Nanda Parbat, they were able to revive Thea in the Lazarus Pit, although she was not quite herself. Felicity took her to one of the rooms to help her clean up and calm her down. Oliver was assigned to a large room as the new Heir to The Demon. Ra’s told them that his friends would have to leave in the morning.

His heart clenched at the thought of having to say goodbye to his sister, his friends, his Felicity. But he had made his promise to save her, and she was alive, so he had to keep his word. God only knew what kind of hell the League of Assassins would unleash on Starling City if he did not stay. Besides, this was all part of a larger plan that he and Malcolm had to bring down the League. He just hoped that he had the resolve to carry it through.

He stared out at the night sky from the balcony of his room. The lack of modern technology in the fortress afforded a gorgeous view of the stars. At least that was one positive thing about this place.

He heard a soft knock on his door and was surprised that someone would be disturbing him at this hour. He was even more surprised when he opened the door to see Felicity standing there, looking determined…but nervous.

“How are you?” she asked, entering the room. Before he had a chance to answer, she was leaping into his arms, wrapping her legs around him and kissing him passionately. The connection between them hummed with joy and desire as they lost themselves in each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bum chicka wow wow! Y'all know what's coming next chapter. ;)


	10. Bonding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver and Felicity solidify their soulmate bond, and she must leave him in Nanda Parbat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Sorry I'm a bit past my normal posting schedule. Hope you enjoy this chapter. I had to raise the rating to Explicit for this! I apologize in advance for my lack of smut-writing skills. LOL

After Felicity had settled Thea down to sleep in their room, she could not calm herself down. Now that the deed was done and Thea was safe, she knew Ra’s would be collecting on Oliver’s promise. She had to come up with a way to stop it. He couldn’t stay here, there was no scenario in which that would be acceptable.

She needed to think. She left their room and started wandering the halls of the fortress. She felt for a moment like she had stepped back in time. When she rounded one corner, she discovered she had entered the main hall and saw the Demon’s Head sitting near the fireplace.

She stormed up to him and said that he would not win, and Oliver would not be staying with him.

“You have a great fire within you. I can see now why Oliver loves you,” Ra’s said to her when she finally stopped her angry rant.

“Oh, you have no idea what it is between me and Oliver. And that is why you underestimate us,” she said.

He told her how at one time, he had been ripped from his family without the opportunity to say goodbye, and by fighting him she was denying herself the chance to do so with Oliver.

“You need to tell Oliver goodbye. Tell him how much you love him. Tell him whatever it is your heart needs to express. And do it now. Before he is lost to you forever,” Ra’s said.

Though she thought his words were based in arrogance because he believed he was more powerful than them, they still gave her pause. They did not have a plan in place yet to rescue Oliver, and she realized then that they had not used all the tools they had in their arsenal to develop that plan.

She hurried away from Ra’s and headed straight for Oliver’s room. She had to make love to Oliver…tonight. Once they had the complete soulmate connection, they would be able to communicate in a way no one would suspect, even at long distances.

When she stopped in front of Oliver’s door she paused. Was she ready to do this? She loved Oliver, but she didn’t want to move their relationship to the next level if they weren’t ready. She thought of their conversation on the plane, and it gave her the courage to knock on his door. But when he opened it, looking very surprised to see her, she lost some of her nerve.

“How are you?” she asked to fill the silence. She looked up to his eyes and saw a smile twinkling there, and she jumped him. She leaped onto him and climbed him like a tree, pressing her lips against his when she reached his mouth.

Oliver reacted immediately, responding to the kiss with a passion that matched her own. After several minutes, he finally drew back and looked at her.

“Felicity…are you sure you want to do this? Are we ready?”

She nodded and pulled him over to the chairs and pushed him into a sitting position and straddled him on his lap. She grabbed his face between her hands.

“Oliver, I’ve known you all of my life. You’ve touched my heart in a way that I never thought was possible,” she said softly. “I love you.”

His eyes brightened when he heard those words for the first time from her out loud in their real life. Without taking his eyes off of her, he removed her glasses and began to kiss her again. They separated and he pulled her shirt over her head and then did the same to his own. Their mouths continued worshipping one another as he picked her up and carried her to the bed.

Felicity gasped when Oliver took one of her nipples into his mouth and gently sucked. The sensation was so overwhelming that it made her dizzy. Love and lust radiated through the connection between them, making both of them almost come instantly. This made Felicity giggle.

“I think we are going to have to get used to that connection thing,” she said.

“Felicity, focus,” he growled into her chest, but she could feel him smile against her. He kissed down her belly as his fingers slipped into her pants and found her heat.

“Oh, God…Oliver,” she said, all traces of humor replaced with pure passion.

He circled her bundle of nerves before sliding a finger into her, followed quickly by another. She felt herself slowly building to an orgasm when Oliver pushed her over the edge by licking a path from her stomach to her clit. When he took it between his lips and sucked, pumping his fingers into her…she shattered into the most mind blowing experience she ever had. Her back arched as she cried out, her fingernails digging into his shoulders.

Once she settled down and sank into the mattress, he looked up at her with a Cheshire cat grin. She don’t know she had the energy to do so, but she managed to smile back at him.

“Yeah, that was way better in real life,” she said. She reached for his hand and pulled him up to her and in for a kiss. She could taste herself on him. Felicity reached down between them and took Oliver’s hardened length in her hands. He moaned into her mouth, and that gave her the courage to pump a few strokes with her fist.

“Felicity, I’m not going to last much longer if you continue that,” he said before dropping his head to devour her neck. She let go of him and let out a matching moan to his when he hit a sensitive spot. He took that opportunity to line himself up with her entrance. He slowly entered her and their world exploded.  Felicity could feel the glorious sensation of Oliver sliding into her, but she could also feel Oliver’s point of view. Her pleasure and his pleasure combined in her. She didn’t know where she ended and he began anymore. It had never been like this in their dream land, and not with the few others she had slept with before Oliver.

She had heard the phrase “two become one,” and this was it. Oliver held himself still for a moment. “Felicity?” he asked.

“Yes, I feel it too,” she whispered. He shook his head in wonderment and leaned down to kiss her, and resumed his slow rhythm. The pressure started to slowly build in her as he continued to slide in and out and hitting her most sensitive spot. The combination of the physical and emotional pleasure pushed her into a frenzy she could no longer control. She wrapped her legs around Oliver and matched his rhythm with her hips, sending her close to the edge.

“Oliver, I can’t…”

“It’s OK, baby, I’ve got you, let go,” his course whisper in her ear told her that he was also close to the end as well.

White flashed in her eyes as she stiffened and screamed his name once again, and as she was riding the waves of pleasure, she heard him shout too as he emptied into her. Their orgasms seemed to last forever, with her feeling everything he was experiencing and vice versa. It seemed as if they would be lost in this never ending moment.

_And I never want it to end_ , Felicity thought.

_Me either,_ Oliver’s voice sounded in her head. Wait, what?

The two of them pulled back from each other and stared incredulously, coming out of their euphoric high.

“Did you just…” Felicity asked in shock.

“Hear your thoughts? Um, I think so. Let’s try it again. Think something,” he said.

_Oliver, I’m always thinking something. I can’t really turn this brain off,_ she thought.

“Oliver, I’m always thinking something. I can’t really turn this brain off,” he repeated back to her.

“Oh Frak!” She said. They both sat down on the bed.

_So can you hear mine too?_ He asked and she nodded.

“I guess this was what they meant by completing the bond. We are literally in each other’s heads. I guess this means we can dream share now too again,” Felicity said.

He laughed and gave her a hug.

“I can think of no one I would rather be in my head,” he said, and now that they were connected, she could tell that he was serious. No more Mr. Hard To Read. Oh Frak, she knew he had heard those thoughts when his mouth turned up into a smile.

“Me either…but Oliver…I go off on a lot of thinking tangents sometimes. I’m a babbling mess up here. I know I talk a lot, but you have no idea how much gets edited before it comes out of my mouth,” Felicity told him.

“Felicity, pretty soon you will discover my brain is no picnic either. All the things I’ve seen. All the things I’ve done. I never wanted to you to be exposed to any of that,” he hung his head. She could hear him thinking about how unworthy he felt to be with her.

“Hey, Oliver, look at me,” Felicity said, taking his face in her hands. “You were made for me. You are my soulmate. My exact and perfect match. All the things you went through helped make you the man I see before me today. And you know how I feel about him.”

He leaned forward and kissed her.

_You know, we probably should try to figure out how all of this works, because we can’t really have it continue to be Grand Central Station in our brains. We’ll never be able to focus on anything else going on in the world if we are always focused on what’s going on in our heads,_ ” Felicity thought.

_I agree. And I think this is going to be beneficial for my plans in the months ahead. For example, please don’t drug my drink and try to drag me out of here against my will_ , Oliver thought.

_Oh Frak. Guess that super secret plan is no longer secret. But Oliver, we absolutely cannot leave you here. It’s not happening._

_Honey, I love you all the more for it, but you have to let it go, just this once, and trust me when I say there is a bigger plan at work,_ Oliver thought.

He spent the next several minutes thinking out his plan to take down the League of Assassins, and emphasized the need for her to act oblivious to all of it. Some of his plan annoyed her to no ends, but she agreed to go along with it…for now.

Wanting to make the most of their last night together for a while, they snuggled up in the bed. They didn’t want to waste any of their time sleeping, so they made love several times and spent the remainder of their time practicing their mind bond.

They learned that they could turn down the volume on each other so they could focus on other things, but they were always there in the back of the mind. It was like there was a TV on in the same room as a radio. They could turn the volume down on one and learn to tune it out, but it was always there in the background. Try as they might, there was no shutting each other out or putting up walls to block information.

This was a good and bad thing. Being so open and having no secrets from each other did amazing things for their relationship. However, getting used to have NOTHING private would be a change. They joked that surprise parties were off the table from now on.

They learned that their bond was stronger when they were touching and wondered how the distance when she left Nanda Parbat would impact it.

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” she said, her voice filled with sorrow. He pulled her into his arms.

“It’ll be OK, baby, the plan is going to work and we will be together someday…I know it,” he said. “We’ve come so far. I know we can make it a little bit longer.”

Soon, the sun started making its appearance and they reluctantly got dressed. They walked silently with the group toward the landing strip where the plane was waiting to take Felicity away from the man she loved. Oliver grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and she took reassurance from the fact that that he knew what she was feeling and felt the same way.

She watched in sadness as he said goodbye Thea and John, and then Felicity gave him a quick kiss. They had agreed not to say goodbye, but that didn’t mean this would be easy. She finally turned and walked away from him toward the awaiting plane, determined not to look back.

_I miss you already_ , he thought, making her smile through her tears. If John and Thea wondered what she was smiling at, they didn’t ask. Felicity curled into a ball the best she could after buckling into one of the plane’s seats. She didn’t even want to look out the window as they took off and the distance between her and Oliver grew.

She could feel the connection between them weaken a bit the further she got away, but thankfully she could still feel him.

_Stay safe, my love,_ she thought. _Come home to me._ She felt him in the back of her mind focusing on what was going on around him, so she didn’t think he would respond.

But as she started to drift off to sleep, she felt a faint whisper cross her mind.

_Always._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this, and I hope you enjoyed it! This was my very first smut writing ever, and I'm not sure I was ready, but here it is!


	11. Soulmate synchronicity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver's plans from within the League of Assassins come to fruition, and he and Felicity get used to their newly bonded state.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the final chapter! I have one cute little epilogue to post after this, but this pretty much wraps up our story. Thank you to everyone who stuck with it and for all the great feedback!

When they arrived backing in Starling City, she could feel Diggle’s eyes on her as they attempted to move on with their regular lives. She knew that he suspected that there was a greater plan at work here, that she was not as down about Oliver’s absence as she should be. She made a mental note to herself to act more depressed when out in public.

She could not read all of Oliver’s thoughts anymore because they were so far apart. But she could hear any thoughts that he projected to her, and she could send thoughts to him. They carried out a long distance conversations in their heads throughout every day. There were some times that he was silent, and that scared her. He tried to protect her as much as he could from the things he was enduring in the League. They also were very much aware of each other's feelings and moods, if not each individual thoughts in their minds. 

There were continual training fights, some of them to the death. Oliver always won, but it took a toll on him because of his promise not to kill in Tommy's memory. She felt his sadness like a weight around her neck. There were hours of torture. The pain he endured, she bore some of it to help ease it for him. And the mind altering drugs they tried to use to erase Oliver to rebuild him into Al Sahim – she was pretty sure they would have worked if she wasn’t there in his mind to anchor him. She held onto Oliver while he gave all appearances that he was gone and the Heir to the Demon was in his place.

She spent a lot of time with Thea, sharing favorite stories of Oliver. Diggle, Lyla and her kind of adopted the girl into their non-traditional family. A few weeks after Oliver left, they received news that Al Sahim was in town to kill Nyssa Al Ghul.

They vowed to protect the female assassin, and Felicity made a quick call to Lyla to let her know that Oliver was on his way to kidnap her. Diggle was most decidedly not on board with this plan, but he trusted Felicity and the bond that she knew she had with Oliver. Still, he was extremely pissed when baby Sara was in the house alone (even if it was only for two minutes before Felicity got there there).

When they encountered Oliver and the League members on a roof where they wanted to trade Lyla for Nyssa, the cold look in his eyes gave her pause for a minute. But as soon as she got close to him, the felt the reassuring buzz of their soulmate bond. Still, she played her part, acting like she felt betrayed by Oliver’s actions. Diggle didn’t have to do much acting, since he was very angry. Thea showed up in Roy’s suit, and Felicity could feel a mixture of surprise, worry, anger and pride coming off of him. The League took Nyssa with them, and Oliver met her eyes as he left.

_Be safe,_ he thought to her before disappearing.  _I love you._

_I love you too,_ she thought back at him.  _Also you look hot with that buzz cut._

Felicity could feel his amusement as he left the city. 

Felicity explained to Team Arrow about the virus that Ra’s had in his possession, and how Oliver planned to infiltrate the League to get it back. She told them that Oliver would need to fool Ra’s into thinking that he had total buy into the League, so he would probably do some things that appeared evil to them. But a time would come when he needed their aid.

When Malcolm Merlyn popped into the foundry to tell them that Oliver needed their help, he was surprised that they did not argue with him at all. Tatsu had come along to help convince them and was not needed, but she knew of Oliver’s soul bond with Felicity, so she was happy to have someone else to talk to about it. Tatsu had a soul bond with her husband, but grief and despair had separated the two of them. He had shut her out of his brain, and traveled across the world to join the League of Assassins so he would not be in danger of being close to her and reconnecting.

This broke Felicity’s heart and filled it with fear. What if the League was finally able to break Oliver? What if it all became too much for him and he chose to stay? On the flight to Nanda Parbat, she started to have a panic attack and fled to the bathroom before anyone could notice.

But one person did notice.

_Felicity? Felicity, baby, what’s wrong? Did something happen? Are you OK?_

She tried to calm herself down long enough to respond to him, but hearing his voice in her head just brought out more fear in her, fear that she might never have that connection again.

_Felicity, you’re scaring me. Is it Merlyn? Did that asshole do something? Baby? That’s it…I’m coming to find you._

Those words snapped her out of her panic attack. While she wanted nothing more than to have Oliver’s arms around her…she knew that him leaving the League now would mean certain death.

_No Oliver, stay put…I’m on my way to Nanda Parbat anyway._

_What is going on? Why are you freaking out?_ Relief that she had finally responded flooded through him. Just hearing him was like a warm blanket washing over her as well.

_I talked to Tatsu…_

_Oh baby…what happened with them IS NOT going to happen with us. I promise you_ , he thought.

_But what if the League finally wears you down? Or what if we have a tragedy like they did in losing their son?_ Felicity tried to calm her panic, which was rising again, because she knew Oliver needed to focus on the mission at hand.

_We have already had our shares of tragedy and have survived. We have already separated a few times and have always…ALWAYS…found our way back to each other. You and me, Pix, we’re a mortal lock. Nothing is going to stop that._

Oliver’s words were successful in calming her down. She knew that she would feel even more better when they were close again. She didn’t pretend to know everything about the soulmate bond, but she knew that it was not designed for a completely bonded pair to be far apart for very long.

_I love you, Rake._

_I love you too. You know, I need a new nickname. I’m not really a rake anymore. I’m definitely a one-woman man._

_Nope, you will always be my handsome Rake._

_Ra’s is coming in; I have to go – are you OK?_

_Yes, focus on what you have to do. I’ll see you soon._

When they landed in Nanda Parbat, they were successful in their attempt to blow up the plane that was supposed to carry the virus to Starling City, but they were attacked by League of Assassins members in the process. Ra’s showed up and told them that the virus hadn’t actually been in the plane that they had destroyed. He ordered Oliver to take them and lock them in the dungeon.

When all her teammates saw the cold look reflected in Oliver’s eyes, they thought the League had succeeded in turning him, and bringing them here had been part of an elaborate plot to destroy the city. Felicity could feel the truth in her connection with him, but she couldn’t very well share that with the team with the League breathing down their necks.

When they were locked in their cell, Oliver threw the “virus” in the room with them, making them think that they were poisoned with it. She was glad that she had inoculated everyone on the plane before they arrived. They awoke not long after Oliver and Ra’s left, and Barry showed up soon after to set them free. She knew the love of her life was marrying Nyssa in a League of Assassins ceremony per Ra’s Al Ghul’s orders as they were escaping, and she tried not to think about it.

League weddings weren’t valid in the real world, right?

_No, they are not, Pix. Besides, Nyssa is about as excited about this as I am. Which is not at all, for the record._

_Just no consummation, bud. Or I will have to use my loud voice. And that would probably hurt in your brain._

He chuckled at that.

Felicity and the rest of the team flew back to Starling City and tried to plan for the possibility that the virus would be unleashed upon them. She felt Oliver panic a little when he had to board a plane with Nyssa, Ra’s and the virus.

_Oliver…_

She felt his heart shatter when he heard her voice in his head.

_Felicity…I’ve got to bring this plane down. It’s the only way. I can’t let it get to Starling. I can’t let all those people die._

No, this was not happening. Her stupid martyr of a soulmate was not going to sacrifice himself. She knew that nothing she said would stop him from doing all he could to save the city.

_I would ask you to not even think about that, but I know you better than that so I’m not going to. But I will ask you to do everything you possibly can to stop him and STAY ALIVE. I need you, Rake. I cannot lose you again._

_I know, Pix, I will do what I can._

_You cannot let him win. You remember who you are. No matter how many times he calls you Al Sahim, that will never be your name. Your name is Oliver Queen._

_My name is Oliver Queen._

Felicity felt him go silent, and she knew that he was making his move, whatever it may be. She waited in the Foundry, biting her nails. The rest of the team waited with her, but they were surprisingly quiet. No one knew what to say to make her feel better, and she didn’t think there was anything they could say.

An hour or so later, Oliver and Nyssa dropped like ninjas into the Foundry, and she was both relieved and worried that his plan to bring down the plane had failed. He was standing there in front of her alive, but there was a deadly virus about to kill most of Starling City.

She smacked Oliver on the arm for his plan to end his life, but she forgave him quickly and even brought him a cup of coffee (totally outside her character) later. They were able to determine the points in the city where the virus would be released, and the team split up to try to stop the League members in those locations.

It all happened so quickly, but seemingly in slow motion at the same time. Oliver defeated Ra’s. Felicity saved him from falling over the side of the dam with Ray’s atom suit. The virus was destroyed. Malcolm Merlyn was the new Ra’s Al Ghul.

They stood in the small office at Palmer Tech, looking at the team of friends and family who had supported them for years. Felicity got tears in her eyes when she thought about how far they had come together.

Diggle needed time to get over Oliver’s idea to not including the team in his plans, and he was going to get plenty of it. Despite his reservations about his sister in the field, Oliver knew that she, Laurel and Diggle could keep Starling City safe for a while.

He walked over to Felicity and grabbed her hands. Oliver looked into her eyes and felt her agreement to his plan running through his head. He told the team that he trusted them, and it was time for him to hang up his hood. It was time for him to find out who he was outside the vigilante business.

While everyone was sad to see them go, they were happy that the two of them had finally gotten together and seemed content.

Later that evening, Felicity wandered around her apartment, not really knowing what to do with herself. Oliver had gone home to the loft to spend time with Thea before they left on their road trip tomorrow. Road trip. It was still hard to think that she and Oliver were finally completely together and going to spend time together in the daytime. What if they couldn’t function as normal people?

_Pix, you’re thinking too loud. And no, you cannot run comms for the team while we are on our trip._

_But Rake, what if they need me?_

_Pix, we have to let the kids grow up._

She sent a mental frown to him and she could feel him smile in return.

_What are you doing anyway? You are supposed to be spending time with Thea._

_I am! We had dinner and talked for a long time. And now we are just eating popcorn and watching a movie. She picked a chick flick and I’m not into it. I’d rather talk to you._

_Get back to your sister! She will totally know you aren’t paying attention._

_No she won’t, don’t be silly._

Suddenly, Felicity’s cell phone buzzed with a text from Thea. “Tell my brother to stop talking to your brain and spend some quality time with me since he will be abandoning me tomorrow.” She felt Oliver laugh in the back of her mind.

_Have fun with your sister, my love. I will see you in the morning._

_Night baby._

And although he was no longer talking to her, she could still feel the buzz of his thoughts in the back of her mind and it gave her comfort. She packed a bag, doing the best to prepare for all environments since Oliver didn’t tell her where they were going. She put a call in to her mom, letting her know that she was safe and would be out of town with Oliver for a while. Her mother had squealed into the phone when she learned that the two of them were finally together. She only got off the phone by promising that she and Oliver would try to swing by Vegas on their road trip.

Seeing her mother aside, the idea had merit. If they thought Felicity Smoak was a force to be reckoned with when she could count cards, they had no idea what she would be like with a boyfriend who could stand behind her opponent and think to her what their cards were. They could clean up! She laughed at that, and she felt Oliver’s amusement too.

Filled with nervous energy, she could not bring herself to settle down to sleep. She decided to power clean her apartment. Who knew when she would be back, or if she would be, so she wanted it to be as clean as possible in case she had to hire movers someday.

Finally, around 3 a.m. she curled up on the couch to watch a Dr. Who marathon. She must have dozed off because suddenly she was in their dreamland and saw a surprised Oliver standing there too. She smiled at him.

“Poor Thea…you abandoned her to sleep during your movie marathon,” she said.

“Ha! She was drooling on her pillow way before me,” Oliver replied, grabbing her hand. “Hi, I missed you.”

“Me too…hey! We’re in our dreamland! We do dream share again!”

“Yes! You know, even though I have you in the daytime now too, I still do miss this place,” Oliver said. “It was like our own special place, just the two of us.”

“I know. Besides, we have so many great memories here,” Felicity said. “I was getting sad thinking that we would never be back. But Oliver...never mind.”

“Pix, what is it? I just realized I cannot read your mind here. So you’re going to have to spill.”

“Oh, I do, do I? I can’t have one place where I have secrets?” she teased.

“Nope, now that I’ve gotten used to being in that amazing mind of yours, I’m kind of addicted,” Oliver said.

Felicity frowned at that.

“OK, what I was going to say was…what if it is too much? I mean, we share our mind and our thoughts all day long,” she said, staring at the ground. “And then we come here every night and dream share.”

“And?” he asked, confused.

“I’m a little worried you’re going to get sick of me,” Felicity said. “Do you think there is such a thing as too much time together?”

She gave him the angriest look she could muster when he threw his head back and laughed.

“I’m glad my anxiety is amusing to you,” she growled.

“No Pix, it’s not your anxiety. It’s just the idea that you and I could spend too much time together. We have been apart for so long. But now that our soulmate connection is here, I never want to be apart again. I love being connected to you,” Oliver said, placing his palms on each of her cheeks.

“But what if…”

“Fe-li-ci-ty. Do you think you could ever get sick of me?”

“No, but you…”

“So why do you think I could ever be sick of you? You have made me whole and without you running through my mind, my life is not worth living,” he said.

“Don’t say that! What if something happens to me?”

“Nothing is ever allowed to happen to you,” he growled.

She laughed at that.

“I love you Oliver,” she said, kissing him. “You are more sweet than you let the rest of the world know.”

“I love you too, my Pix. And if you ever need a break from me, I promise to go far far away and weaken our bond a bit,” he said.

“Never,” she said, hugging him close.

When they woke up the next day, it only took Oliver about 10 minutes to show up at her apartment. He pulled her immediately in for a kiss…which turned into a steamy make out session…which ended up in the bedroom…which then moved to the shower.

Finally, they were ready to leave on their trip and Oliver proudly showed her the convertible Thea had purchased for them with some of the millions Malcolm Merlyn had left her. They drove out of Starling City with the top down.

As they drove down the coast Oliver could not stop smiling, and it was contagious.

“Do you want to know something?” He asked.

“You’re happy,” she said with a smile. She laid her hand on his.

_Me too,_ she thought to him. _Me too._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for the kudos, comments, bookmarks and subscriptions. I am new this year to writing fanfiction, so all of your feedback really was encouraging! 
> 
> I will probably post the epilogue tomorrow.


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keeping secrets is hard when you share a soulmate bond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We made it, guys! Here is the short little epilogue to this story! Thanks to everyone who came along for the ride!

_Six months later…._

“Oliver, why are you singing The Star Spangled Banner loudly in your head?”

“No reason!”

“Oliver, seriously, you are giving me a migraine.”

“Only a little bit longer, my love. I have a surprise for you…and surprises are so hard with us.”

“Do you mean the secret wedding you’ve been planning for the two of us on the beach? Yeah, I kind of know about that,” Felicity said with a grin. They had been in Bali for a few weeks, and Oliver had started planning from the day they arrived.

“No, I knew that you would figure out that secret. That was my red herring secret,” he said.

“Red herring secret? What the heck are you talking about? And seriously, Oliver? Smells Like Teen Spirit is the next song your brain leaped to after our national anthem?”

“I’ve found that the more random the playlist, the more off guard you are.”

“It won’t work…you know I always find out.”

“Not this time.”

Oliver got a look of satisfaction on his face when there was a knock on their bungalow door. Felicity started crying tears of joy when she saw her mother and all of Team Arrow there to witness their wedding. He was just proud of himself for managing to pull off the surprise.

They were married on the beach at sunset, connecting the daytime and the nighttime, just as their journey had.

_Two years later_

“Seriously, Felicity? What the hell is this song you have stuck in your head? It’s so weird!”

“Oh that? It’s just something left over from my goth phase”

“Then why is it in your head now?”

“No reason.”

“Pix _._ ”

“The more random the playlist…”

“You’ve got a secret.”

Oliver narrowed his eyes at her and she just grinned at him.

“Yep,” she said. “Sit down.”

He did and she came over to him with a small box in her hand. She handed it to him and waited for him to open it.

When he did, he almost dropped it in shock.

“Is this a pregnancy test?”

“Yes”

“Does it say what I think it says?”

“Yes”

“We’re going to have a baby?”

“Yes”

Oliver just stared in shock at the stick for a long time, but Felicity could feel the wonder, shock, joy, anxiety flow through him.

She leaned forward and kissed him. He looked up with tears in his eyes.

“Best surprise ever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, everyone. :) I will probably write some more AUs in the future. This has been really fun.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please drop me a comment, they make me do a happy dance (which weirds my kids out).


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